Black NYC Bakery Worker Shows Tremendous Restraint When White Woman Hurls N-Word At Him
A New York woman who refused to wear a mask at a bakery reportedly launched into a racist rant at a worker there when a cashier asked her to put on a face covering, and now she’s refusing to apologize for it.
According to CBS New York, the woman, identified as Stehpanie Denaro, did not cover her face inside the Davidovich Bakery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Sunday morning (March 21). But when she was asked to do so, she launched into a tirade of racial slurs and insults at the cashier -- who somehow found a way not to lose his cool -- while her children were standing next to her.
Witnesses were shocked at the rant, but also surprised that the cashier, identified only as “Vic,” who is Black, kept his cool.
“What she said was really horrible. She’s saying really laced racial slurs in front of four biracial children who were just kind of frozen,” witness Jack Weil told CBS New York. Another witness, who took the video said a security guard even let her skip the line so she could get her bagel and leave.
“The bagel worker doesn’t want to serve her, so the security is like, ‘You’re not gonna get served. You’re holding the line, you should leave,'” the man said. “I didn’t know she was a racist when I took out my phone.” The woman wound up having security escort her out.
For his part, Vic chose not to react to her at all, staying calm while the woman spewed her racism at him and said this comes after all society’s gone through over the past year.
“I feel like we’ve been going through this...racism, we went through COVID all year last year, we went through George Floyd. We went through all types of situations,” he said. “I felt like we were moving forward, honestly, that’s where I’m at. I thought we were moving forward. I’m educated enough and smart enough, and I think we’re in a world where… love surpasses hatred. Seeing her kids right next to her I couldn’t say anything to her.”
But Denaro, who is reportedly outspokenly anti-vaccination and anti-mask, took to her now-deleted Instagram account to double down on what she said.
“I STAND BY WHAT I SAID!!!! You mistreat me with my children. You infringed on my freedoms. I have freedom of speech. I can SAY WHAT I FEEL. Leave me alone and stop attacking me for saying my opinion,” she said, according to The New York Daily News, also noting that her children have a Black father and the words “b**** a** n*****” was “a term I’ve heard them use all my life.”
She also tried to rationalize using the phrase: “I’m sorry I said something like that in front of my children,” she allowed. “But to say a variance of a word is off limits because of somebody’s skin tone? That’s just a weird form of gate-keeping. If a Black mother was using these words, wouldn’t it be child abuse too?”
The bakery sided with their employee Vic in a Facebook post.
