A Tennessee man was driving to a Starbucks in Memphis Sunday evening when he put on his turn signal, switched lanes in front of another motorist, and then turned into the parking lot. The driver he had pulled in front of followed him.
When the man, identified only as Brandon, noticed the driver was flipping him off, he stopped his car and rolled down his window, telling Fox 13 Memphis that he intended to “have a peaceful conversation with the guy.”
“But when I rolled the window down, I couldn’t even get a word in before he went on this racist tangent,” Brandon told Fox 13.
The video of the confrontation is shocking. The man appears like he’s about to leave, but when he sees Brandon recording he comes back over and voices support for Donald Trump, saying, “Trump, Trump all the way,” before launching into a tirade, calling Brandon the n-word countless times, saying black lives don’t matter and even claiming at one point that white people got “ripped off” when slavery ended.
When an unseen woman in the Trump supporter’s car starts to interject herself in the argument, the man turns back to the car and says, “Let me handle this, be a woman,” before slamming the door.
By Monday morning, the video had been retweeted on Twitter more than 17,000 times.
Brandon remained calm throughout the four-and-a-half-minute video, turning the camera towards himself after the confrontation ended and saying, “That’s exactly why y’all need to get out and vote.”
Several people commented on the post that Brandon should’ve physically confronted the man. Brandon said in a video interview that though he was angry, he has two kids and decided that rather than possibly go to jail he wanted to “kill the guy with kindness.”
“I’ve seen it a million and one times in my life. I’ve seen it more covertly, but for someone to be overt about it is sort of a rarity,” Brandon said. “But the fact that he was that passionate and expressing that much hatred on video is the shocking part.”
“I just wanted to show that it still happens, it’s not a thing of the past, it’s real,” he added.
Brandon also said he hoped people wouldn’t think of the video as an excuse for violence or more racist rhetoric.
“I forgave the guy the moment he closed the door,” Brandon said. “His decision doesn’t define the people who look like him.”