A former hotel employee lost his job after first losing his temper and calling a Black guest a “f***ing monkey.” The hotel manager has called for “sensitivity training,” but a look at the corporation’s all white male leadership team suggests that competency at the top would be a better place to begin.
The former Radisson Hotel employee, identified in the video as Dwayne, lashed out when Irby Fogleman asked for a different room for his mother because the one she was given smelled like smoke, and Fogleman’s mother does not smoke.
Fogleman’s mother was staying at the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson in Newport News, Va., where Dwayne is no longer employed, hotel manager Lisa Little told 13News Now in a statement.
Fogleman started recording the interaction in the middle of Dwayne’s tirade but did capture the moment the former employee called him a monkey.
Dwayne called the hotel “my property” and told Fogleman and his family to leave.
“I’m a f***ing monkey Oh, so you’re racist You don’t like me because I’m Black Cool, that’s all you had to say,” Fogleman answered.
“No, I don’t like you ’cause you’re a d*ck,” Dwayne snapped back.
The incident took place on Friday, May 4, and Dwayne was fired by Monday.
#AirbnbWhileBlack is no longer an option after a white woman called the police on a group of Black people who didn’t say hello to her. Apparently, #HotelWhileBlack may not end in a police encounter but could result in an angry encounter with a racist employee.
Little, the hotel manager, said “sensitivity training” would take place, USA Today reported.
In her statement to 13News Now Little said:
“On behalf of the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson Newport News, Va. I want to apologize for the inappropriate behavior and comments of one of our employees from an incident that occurred on Friday, May 4. We are taking this matter very seriously and effective today (May 7, 2018), the employee in the video has been terminated. As a result of this incident we will also be re-training every employee this week on our code-of-conduct policies to help ensure something like this never happens again.”
A top-down approach, starting with a look at who’s in charge of the company, would perhaps be a better place to start. Radisson Hotel Group’s global leadership team is entirely white and male.
Little did not specify when the “training” would take place. In Starbucks’ case, the company has scheduled a diversity training on May 29th. Luke Visconti, CEO of Fair360, formerly DiversityInc, explained in a recent column why this will likely be ineffective:
“If there was a problem with the temperature of the milk used to put in coffee, it would take them longer to study the problem than six weeks, and they wouldn’t hire celebrities (Eric Holder) in an attempt to give them credibility. The speed at which they are doing this says to me that this is a PR reaction. But it’s not a PR problem. As evidenced by the poor human capital results on their own corporate leadership page (57 people pictured, 19 women, three Blacks, no apparent Latinxs), the corporate culture needs to be repaired from the head down — as it does for all strategic business problems.”
