Now that the owner of Nellie’s, a gay bar in Washington, D.C., has made amends for a violent incident involving one of its security guards and a black customer, the protesters who have been making noise outside for weeks can all go home.
Just kidding! That’s never how this works when dealing with the “social justice” mob — and how naive of the owner to have thought so.
Doug Schantz, the bar owner, posted a note last week on Facebook apologizing for an incident the previous month wherein a security guard on duty attempted to break up a brawl happening on the second floor. It resulted in the guard yanking a woman who was involved in the fight by the arm, down the steps and toward the exit.
The woman was 22-year-old Keisha Young, who Schantz said was treated “inappropriately, unsafely and disrespectfully.” He said the security contractor had been fired over the incident. “We apologize to her for how she was treated,” Schantz said.
He further committed to mandating “inclusion training” (re-education) for all bar staff and said he had named a local Latino transgender person as a new manager and “director of community engagement.”
Reading the whole pathetic statement feels like watching poor Schantz enter the den of a lion infected with rabies, hoping a snack he brought will allow him to pet the beast unmolested. As anyone who has followed countless similar conflicts spun up by Black Lives Matter groups into racial warfare could predict, Schantz would not be allowed to pet the sick animal. He would be mauled.
Collective Action for Safe Spaces, the scam organization (sometimes referred to as an “advocacy group”) that Schantz reached out to for bar staff sensitivity courses, rejected the overture, stating it didn’t believe the request was made “in good faith,” but instead was mere “damage control.”
“We stand with survivors & survivor-led movements for accountability,” the group said in a statement. “As of July 16, demands issued by DC organizers … have not been met — including an apology to Keisha Young. Nor has Nellie’s management engaged the organizations issuing these demands.”
Those demands, by the way, included that the bar “give reparations to the black queer and trans community” and that it remain shut down until all demands were met.
Organizers also wanted the bar owners to subject themselves to a humiliating public “listening session,” wherein, no doubt, protesters would take turns screaming at them and demanding they apologize for being white. (This was once known in China as a “struggle session,” but in present-day America, we call it “listening.”)
It should be noted here that the entire ordeal traces back to a physical conflict involving not a single white person. The security guard who put his hands on Young, as she was raining blows atop another man’s head, is also black. And Nellie’s is the exact opposite of an institution of white supremacy. In the decade I’ve lived in this city, the bar has gone from a popular place for a fairly diverse crowd. Now, on any given night, much if not most of the clientele is black.
The noisy protests in front of Nellie’s continue, and now a local government body, no doubt responding to the threatening pressure, has determined that the bar should perhaps lose its license to operate.
That’s how these race shakedowns work. Intimidate and demand. Anything short of complete submission comes with consequences.
Doug Schantz never should have tried engaging the rabid lion.
