Fourteen year-old Peter Osazuwa had just purchased some donuts in downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts. Dunkin’ Donuts made a mistake in completing the order and gave the kid extra donuts as an apology. Peter shared the donuts with his friends, but had an extra one that he offered to a white gentleman walking by on the street. What happened next is truly sickening:
The passerby, a white man, flew into a tirade against the Black teenager, bombarding him with racial slurs.
“He was asking him, ‘Do you want a donut?” and he went off,” Adama Barry, the teenager’s mother, said in an interview Tuesday. “The guy started yelling, using the n-word on him.”
As the man yelled at Peter and two of his friends, bystanders approached and attempted to intervene, but the man continued shouting, according to Barry and video of the episode, which Barry provided to the Globe.
Just before the man drove off in a Lexus sedan, someone asked him, “What did you call him?” the video shows. The man shouted the n-word through his sunroof and drove away.
Peter and his family have been in Newburyport since 2008 and haven’t experienced much overt racism, Until this past year:
“This is the second time my kids were called the n-word. They were told to go back where they came from” by a neighbor in their subsidized housing development, Barry said. “My kids were like, ‘What do they mean? This is where we’re from.’ They don’t know anywhere else. … I’m originally from Africa, but they’ve never been to Africa.”
I wonder why the recent hostility?
Over the last few days the president has tweeted context-free videos of random incidents involving black people attacking white people and baselessly argued that President Barack Obama, the country’s first black leader, committed “treason.” In an interview with the Catholic News Agency that was posted online on Monday, Mr. Trump said he planned to sign an order to protect national monuments at a time when statues of Confederate generals are being torn down across the country.
Hats off to the Newburyport police, who are now investigating the hate incident. Hopefully the have the license plate number of the Trump supporter white gentleman.
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