White hipsters continue to gentrify areas of Brooklyn, N.Y., and some bring with them retro racism.
In Bushwick, Chris Giardina, a white real estate agent, was caught on cellphone video hurling racial insults at a bouncer, Jose Arturo Lopez, outside of the venue House of Yes on Friday. As a result, Giardina lost his job as a real estate agent for apartment broker MySpace NYC.
The video, which documents Giardina’s hate-filled meltdown, went viral with shares on Facebook, Reddit and YouTube.
“Touch me again you f****ing n***er,” he said to Lopez.
“Why did you say that” Rahir Cozart, who filmed the incident, asked Giardina.
He answered Cozart’s question by calling him a racial slur directed at Latinos.
“Yeah I said it, ’cause he’s punching me you f****ing s**c.”
Giardina called 911 on Lopez alleging that he struck him for exiting out the wrong door. Lopez said he did not punch him “but says a fellow bouncer pushed the man before the cameras were rolling,” according to The New York Post.
“Get a cop here now or I’m going to end up burying this Black guy,” he says on the phone.
Then Giardina walks up to the bouncer and shouts, “I will bury you, you understand.” He says it several times.
He then tells police on the phone, “This bouncer is going to get his a** whooped right now.”
Giardina, a Boston-area native, hangs up the phone and continues to confront the bouncer.
“You hit me in the face like a dirty, f****ing Black person,” he says.
“I hate ignorant people. S**c ignorance, Black ignorance,” Giardina also says, pointing at Cozart and Lopez.
“What is this, Harlem” he adds.
“You’ll lose your job and you’ll lose your house,” he says to Lopez. “Trust me.”
Police made no arrests when they arrived on the scene.
MySpace NYC fired the real estate agent over the video. Principal broker Shawn Mullahy told The Post he was “disappointed,” “embarrassed” and “saddened” by the video. “It’s not in line with the company culture or values,” he said.
Giardina told the newspaper he was drunk at the time and the N-word, “that I’m embarrassed by using, was being thrown around the entire time. It was already in the air.”
He added, “It doesn’t make me a racist; it makes me an idiot.”
“We are deeply appreciative of the way [the bouncer] kept his composure while the aggressive patron was hurling racial slurs at him, and we feel he acted fully within his rights throughout the interaction,” Jacqui Rabkin, a marketing director at House of Yes, told Gothamist.
Rabkin also said that when police asked the bouncer if he wanted to press charges, he answered that “his only desire was for everyone to get home safely and he did not want to waste the emergency unit’s valuable time.”
