Forget “the customer is always right.” Now it’s “If the customer is white and I’m uptight, we’re gonna fight.” Some are essentially drawing this conclusion after video emerged of an Amazon driver saying something about “white privilege” and then attacking a customer who’d grown impatient over sub-par service. In fact, one commentator warns that this incident is a portent of things to come.
As MSN reported over the weekend:
The Amazon employee, Itzel Ramirez, 21, was delivering a package Thursday night for a 67-year-old woman when an altercation broke out, according to the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department.
Doug Smith, the owner of the apartment complex, told NBC Bay Area that the resident asked Ramirez about the package after she received an alert that it had arrived. Ramirez reportedly told her to be patient. After 15 minutes went by, Ramirez was approached by the resident again.
According to the sheriff’s office, Ramirez said something about “white privilege” and the resident in return called her a “[expletive].” Deputies say Ramirez then hit the older woman 10 times in the face. The woman sustained injuries to her face and head and likely suffered a broken nose, officials said.
According to the sheriff, the victim merely said that Ramirez was “acting like a b****.” For Ramirez’s part, she claimed self-defense, but the video (below) tells a different tale.
I can relate to the victim’s situation, as it has been reported. I once was alerted that a package (not from Amazon) I expected was “delivered,” only to find it wasn’t by my mailbox. Rightly concerned it might have been stolen, I spent time making a couple of phone calls and waiting on hold, only to learn that the lazy delivery man had electronically identified all his packages as having been delivered upon picking them up prior to delivery. If this happened with the Amazon driver, it was dereliction of duty.
Yet it doesn’t matter if the victim’s impatience was justified or not because the attack certainly wasn’t. It also reflects something deeper, as commentator Andrea Widburg points out, connecting the dots well.
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After mentioning that Ramirez’s white privilege accusation was born of Critical Race Theory (CRT) indoctrination and “showed that she viewed herself as a victim of a predatory and evil person,” Widburg notes that the driver’s self-defense claim “is not as ridiculous as it sounds.”
The writer explains:
Young people today are repeatedly told that, if they’re a member of a victim class — and Ramirez has already established that she believes this — words from the victimizer are violence. They’re not justifications for violence. They’re not things that hurt your feelings. They are violence. They are equal in weight and pain to a physical attack. The days of “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me” are gone.
If you’ve been attacked physically, you are reasonable to respond in kind. And that’s what Ramirez did.
Ramirez is being held on $100,000 bail and will be charged with elder abuse and battery. That’s as it should be because she is ultimately responsible for her conduct. But let’s be honest here: Ramirez did what she did because our culture has taught her to view herself as a threatened victim and to believe anything a White person says or does is violence.
Given that Ramirez is part of a generation trained to think this way, you can expect that there will be other, similar attacks.
We certainly can.
By the way, mentioning the “sticks and stones” line isn’t to imply that words are ever and always innocuous. Words have launched wars and won peace; they have elevated heroes and demagogues alike. Words inspired then-vice president Aaron Burr to kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. And words are how CRT is related and no doubt played a significant role in forming the prejudices that motivated Ramirez to launch her last Thursday attack.
In fact, we say “The pen is mightier than the sword” precisely because words are powerful and must be used wisely. This means you don’t use your words to transmit the notion that other words are actual violence, which implies that a real violent response is merely proportionate force. Nor should words be used to demonize a group unfairly.
Speaking of which, CRT curriculum is nothing but Hating Whitey 101. And Caucaphobia is now all the rage on college campuses. Consider the recent story about how a psychiatrist gave a lecture at Yale University titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” in which she described her fantasies of murdering white people. Of course, this psychiatrist likely won’t do the actual dirty work. The world’s Ramirezes will.
It’s quite ironic, and sometimes no coincidence, that the people who complain most about words constituting violence are themselves inspiring violence with their own words.
