‘He took off like a shot’: Hamilton gym manager recalls day she sprinted after teenage vandal — and caught him
It is not easy running in black dress shoes.
Especially when it is January and the sidewalks are a slushy mess, and especially when you are 36-years-old and wearing dress pants in addition to dress shoes, and not merely out for a casual jog but sprinting, flat-out, like Florence Griffith Joyner, circa 1988, in hot pursuit of a teenager with the physique of a high school football player who had just kicked in a glass door at the fitness club where you work as the manager.
And being a responsible manager, as Lindsay Geddes at the Lime Ridge Mall GoodLife fitness club in Hamilton most definitely is, there simply wasn’t time to fret about footwear choices. There was only time to either stay put or take action on that January day in 2012. Ms. Geddes, a once-upon-a-time high school soccer star, with shoulder length blond hair and a Dad who was a cop, isn’t your sit tight and call 911 type.
“He was a bigger boy, a lot taller than I am,” Ms. Geddes tells me. “I came out of the gym and said, ‘Hey, you kicked our door in.’ And he started to walk away. Then he bolted.”
He took off like a shot.
“I thought, you know what, that’s just not right — you need to take responsibility for what you did — and so I followed him,” Ms. Geddes says. “I was on a mission. I could have run all day.” (Glenn Lowson for the National Post)
Amanda Berry has arrived home at her sister’s house in Cleveland. Amanda was expected to make a statement but her sister says she will not be speaking today.
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The troubling viral trend of the “hilarious” Black poor person
May 7, 2013Charles Ramsey, the man who helped rescue three Cleveland women presumed dead after going missing a decade ago, has become an instant Internet meme. It’s hardly surprising—the interviews he gave yesterday provide plenty of fodder for a viral video, including memorable soundbites (“I was eatin’ my McDonald’s”) and lots of enthusiastic gestures. But as Miles Klee and Connor Simpson have noted, Ramsey’s heroism is quickly being overshadowed by the public’s desire to laugh at and autotune his story, and that’s a shame. Ramsey has become the latest in a fairly recent trend of “hilarious” black neighbors, unwitting Internet celebrities whose appeal seems rooted in a “colorful” style that is always immediately recognizable as poor or working-class.
Before Ramsey, there was Antoine Dodson, who saved his younger sister from an intruder, only to wind up famous for his flamboyant recounting of the story to a reporter. Since Dodson’s rise to fame, there have been others: Sweet Brown, a woman who barely escaped her apartment complex during a fire last year, and Michelle Clarke, who couldn’t fathom the hailstorm that rained down in her hometown of Houston, and in turn became “the next Sweet Brown.”
Granted, the buzzworthy tactic of reporters interviewing the most loquacious witnesses to a crime or other event is nothing new, and YouTube has countless examples of people of all ethnicities saying ridiculous things. One woman, for instance, saw fit to casually mention her breasts while discussing a local accident, while another man described a car crash with theatrical flair. Earlier this year, a “hatchet-wielding hitchhiker” named Kai matched Dodson’s fame with his astonishing account of rescuing a woman from a racist attacker. But none of those people have been subjected to quite the same level of derisive memeification as Brown, Clark, and now, perhaps, Ramsey—the inescapable echoes of “Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife!” and “Kabooyaw,” the tens of millions of YouTube hits and cameos in other viral videos, even commercials.
It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.
Ramsey is particularly striking in this regard, since, for a moment at least, he put the issue of race front and center himself. Describing the rescue of Amanda Berry and her fellow captives, he says, “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!”
The candid statement seems to catch the reporter off guard; he ends the interview shortly afterward. And it’s notable that among the many memorable things Ramsey said on camera, this one has gotten less meme-attention than most. Those who are simply having fun with the footage of Ramsey might pause for a second to actually listen to the man. He clearly knows a thing or two about the way racism prevents us from seeing each other as people.
Now that you know this is a thing, please stop sharing these memes. Poor Black people speaking candidly about various serious incidents isn’t a hilarious joke.
was just thinking this today
It’s never that they are laugh with us.
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Have You Ever Tried to Force-Feed a Captured Human?
U.S. Naval medics are forcing tubes down the noses of detainees at Guantánamo Bay in order to feed them against their will. The U.N. has said this violates international law. When does “suicide prevention” become torture?
Read more. [Image: macmillan.org]
Airline introduces world’s first ‘pay-by-weight’ customer charge
Air travel is ripe for world firsts – take Virgin Atlantic‘s in-flight art gallery for example. In a slightly more controversial move, Samoa Air is now claiming to be the first airline in the world to charge passengers based on their own weight, as well as their luggage. READ MORE…
