Counter-Currents
1,667 words
Legitimate acts of anti-black hatred and violence are so rare these days, it’s like seeing a ghost wearing disco shorts and roller-blading in the middle of the street on the bad side of town. One feels compelled to grab their smartphone and start snapping pictures, because no one would believe you otherwise.
Somewhere in the murky expanses between full-blown racially motivated murder and flat-out hate-crime hoaxes exists a shadowland where some opportunistic and hyper-sensitive twat from a designated victim group will misunderstand something and blow it out of proportion.
Marquise Vanzego seems to be that type of guy. No, I didn’t make up his name—I’m just reporting it. On August 23, after he stereotypically ordered chicken from a drive-thru at a Chick-Fil-A franchise in Maryland, Marquise found himself shocked, bewildered, frightened, and incensed to discover that the young white male who prepared his order had rendered his name as “MONKEYS” on the receipt.
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Like a spoiled infant who knows they’ll get hugs and attention when they toss down their rattle and start bawling, Marquise decided to be a big fat black baby about this.
He promptly filmed himself harassing the black woman who gave him his order at the pick-up window. Then he filmed himself charging into the Chick-Fil-A and demanding atonement from the clearly uncomfortable fast-food workers, at least half of whom are black.
Then, to shame them, destroy them, and share his pain with the universe, he posted these damning videos online for the world to see and disgustedly shake their damn heads at all he’d endured in the name of racial justice. Since this is the current year, major media outlets picked up the story and ran with it.
Vanzego whined to an NBC reporter:
It was devastating. It just set me back years. As a black male, we’ve gone through a lot, and it’s a constant reminder, just when you think you’re healing from a situation, someone opens that wound back up…. Racism is still alive.
To forever heal that wound and to kill racism now and in perpetuity, he told the Today show that he’d hired an attorney and is mulling whether he should file a federal lawsuit to stop this sort of thing from ever happening again.
On August 27, after he’d stewed and marinated and flailed and thrashed in agony about his savagely traumatizing racialization, he published an open letter on Facebook to Chick-Fil-A CEO Andrew Cathy:
Dear Mr, [sic] Cathy
I would like to take this time to express my outrage and disgust over an appalling incident I experienced at the Chick-fil-A in LaPlata, Maryland. On this past Friday August 23, 2024, at approximately 8:00 PM, I placed an order through the drive-thru, speaking directly to a young white male. When I reached the pickup window and received my food and drink, I was shocked to see that the label on my order read “Monkeys” instead of my name, “Marquise” which I had clearly communicated to the drive through team member….
This racist and derogatory labeling is not only deeply offensive but also humiliating as a 52-year-old African American adult male. The sheer hurt of seeing that word takes me back to a painful history, one where my ancestors endured the same dehumanizing racism that was meant to strip away their dignity. The fact that such a vile slur was used so casually in this day and age is a stark reminder that the trauma of those times is still very much alive.
I have been a loyal customer, frequently patronizing this establishment several times a week, and to be treated in such a dehumanizing manner has caused me significant mental anguish and trauma. The situation is profoundly disheartening, and it’s unacceptable that anyone should have to endure such an experience, especially from a business they support….
Sincerely,
Marquise Vanzego
Andrew Truett Cathy became CEO of the Atlanta-based Chick-Fil-A in 2021, a year after his father, Dan Cathy, humiliated the entire white race by shining a black man’s shoes live and on camera during the Summer of Floyd while acknowledging that BLM rioters had smashed up about a dozen Chick-Fil-A restaurants in the week leading up to his vomit-inducing display of self-abasement.
But regarding the latest Chick-Fil-A racial scandal, was it all a simple misunderstanding? The term “mondegreen” refers to misheard words. Was this just a “monkeygreen”? Note that the anonymous white-male underage Chick-Fil-A clerk made it plural. He didn’t directly call him a “monkey” in the singular sense, which would have made more sense if he was only trying to defame him. When you hear Mr. Vanzego pronounce his first name, you could be forgiven for thinking it sounds quite a bit like “Monkeys.”
The venerable Black Enterprise weighs in:
While his first name, Marquise, sounds slightly similar to monkeys, the notion that someone, especially a Black [sic] man, would be so named should have raised concerns from the employee. However, perhaps due to Vanzego’s Blackness [sic], the drive-thru worker, described as a white male, wrote the name down.
Hilariously similar things have happened before. An employee at a Maryland Starbucks was suspended in December 2022 after they wrote “Monkey” on the Venti Caramel Frappuccino that a woman named Monique had ordered. As with the similarity between “Marquise” and “Monkeys,” the name “Monique” isn’t very far from “Monkey,” either, especially when you consider how painfully illiterate many of the young’uns are these days.
In February 2023 at a Chick-Fil-A in Charlotte, NC, another racial-receipt scandal erupted when a young black woman whose last name is Jackson and whose first name is either spelled “Nyiashia” or “Niashia”—because every extant report on the story online spells it both ways, proving that black people need to give their children names that restaurant clerks are able to both comprehend and spell—said she was “just in shock” after the name on her receipt was spelled “Nigga” instead.
“You shouldn’t have to be trained to not call someone a Nigga,” young Ms. Jackson said. Pish-posh—our culture is deeply invested in training people not to call anyone “Nigga.” But should we have to waste taxpayers’ hard-earned dough to train every minimum-wage cashier to spell the latest incomprehensible name you people concoct?
And have you noticed that no one bats an eye about all the anti-monkey hatred, which runs rampant and unchecked in our society? Neither is anyone the slightest bit perturbed that it’s supposed to be racist even to associate black people with chicken, just as it’s a hate crime to hint that these people gorge their maws in other foodstuffs such as bananas and watermelon.
Over the years, Chick-Fil-A has murdered, and possibly even tortured, billions of chickens to help appease black Americans’ animalistic yearning for the low-priced comestible. It staggers me to see how people are getting hung-up on mere words without a care for the ongoing Chick-O-Caust.
No one cares about the chickens or monkeys.
Recent American history is awash with “racist receipt” scandals involving black people and chicken. In each of the following cases, it appears that mischievous employees did write the slurs, but that doesn’t mean that the aggrieved black chicken-eaters had to run crying to the media:
In 2023, a Pennsylvania woman who’d ordered blackened chicken panini saw “the N-word” on her receipt. The restaurant owner admitted to it.
In 2014 at a sports tavern in Harrisburg, PA, a black man named Marquis Moore said he was “shocked” to find the word “nigga” printed near his check number. What had he ordered? Chicken wings.
At a New Jersey pizza joint in 2015, a black woman ordered chicken wings “fried hard” and said she wound up feeling “very offended and upset and disrespected” when some scamp in the kitchen wrote under “special instructions” that the wings should be “fried hard like a black dick.”
I couldn’t find many examples of customers outright forging racial slurs onto their bills in the style of a classic hate-crime hoax. Instead, most of the hoaxing seems to be coming from the servers. The culinary annals are replete with stories of waiters and waitresses—none of them straight white males—committing hate crimes against themselves on receipts for money and attention.
Behold Toni Christina Jenkins, who in 2014 received thousands of sympathy dollars as well as sympathetic writeups on sites such as Gawker after she claimed a customer at a Red Lobster restaurant in Tennessee scrawled the word “nigger” on her receipt, only for it to emerge that Jenkins had called herself a nigger.
In 2018 at a Japanese steak house in Waco, TX, a Hispanic waitress wrote an anti-Hispanic slur on a white male customer’s bill and blamed him for it. According to a local sheriff, the lying Latina eventually confessed that she wrote “the racial comment on the ticket herself due to being upset that day.”
At another Texas steak house in 2018, a 20-year-old waiter named Khalil Cavil posted an image of a receipt where someone had scribbled the message “We don’t tip terrorist [sic].” Under the image, Mr. Cavil wrote:
Last night at work I received this note from one of my tables…. At the moment I didn’t know what to think nor what to say, I was sick to my stomach…. I share this because I want people to understand that this racism, and this hatred still exists. Although, this is nothing new, it is still something that will test your faith.
Turns out he’d “fabricated the entire story.”
In 2013 at the Asian Gallop Bistro in Bridgewater, NJ, a lesbian waitress was fired after it was discovered she’d written an anti-sapphic slur on a receipt and blamed it on her customers.
But my guts tell me that in the curious case of Marquise Vanzego, he was simply crying monkey. His hyperbolic self-pity suggests that he’s showing off his imagined racial wounds for fame and money. I refuse to accept that he feels that much pain, devastation, heartache, and trauma. Therefore, although there are still four months left in 2024, I am prematurely giving him my Pettiest Negro of the Year Award.
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20 comments
In retaliation we need to come up with some creative, borderline insensitive names for our children. Honkia? Caucasia?
Caucasia is a nice name.
I seem to recall Mr. Goad writing somewhere that these moronic negro names are a giant middle finger thrust directly at the white man. Be that as it may, how in God’s name do they come up with this crap? They certainly shouldn’t expect anyone to be able to “spell” them. I used to have several teacher friends (they got out of that game long ago, while the gettin’ was good), and one of them used to bring his roll book to parties to provide comic relief. A name remains clear in my memory: the pickaninny’s mammy wanted to call him Democracy, but somehow she had rendered it as “Dimarkchrisy.” Hard to believe, I know, but you can search for his name and discover that the police put him out of his misery in Greensboro, NC years ago, following a high-speed chase, in those bygone days when the cops could do their jobs.
I went to high school with a MacDamien.
They really seem to like apostrophes and Q’s I’ve noticed. That and taking an existing name and adding a syllable to it.
I find it funny how a lot of them will saddle their kid with an unpronounceable and unspellable name but then call them “Pookie” “Baby” “BooBoo” or some other dumb nickname well into their adulthood. A former coworker has two sons he calls “Bubbles” and “Face” and a granddaughter he calls “Stink.”
Yes, the apostrophes were a big deal for them, especially back in the 90s. The teacher friend had several students in each class with two or three per name, sometimes randomly tagged on at the end (e.g., La’Mo’nique’). They also like to combine honky names to come up with something uniquely theirs. The assistant principal in Texas whose eyeball was knocked out of its socket by a rampaging yoof a few weeks ago–she wasn’t Sandra or Candy but Candra. Go figure.
Best/worst name combo ever.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=sharkeisha+video&mid=4173C86E2176332649C34173C86E2176332649C3&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
It seems like a particularly big middle finger (or big ego) that they often adopt as part of their name such high-falutin’ aristocratic titles as: Marquis, Prince, King, Queen, Pharaoh, etc. It’s almost like they can only identify as either slaves or masters (or, paradoxically, both at the same time), but not regular Joe Schmoes.
I also went to school with a kid named Sultan, but with two a’s(Sultaan) for some reason. Pronounced Sultawn.
Yes, indeed, to the royalty references. I’ve recently had a business interaction with a melanin-enhanced female named “Princess”. A complete misnomer, I assure you!
Sounds like an honest — yet still funny — mistake on the employee’s part. Black names come with their own set of unique risks.
From the White liberal POV, the biggest problem is White people laughing at Blacks.
“I refuse to accept that he feels that much pain, devastation, heart ache and trauma.” Apparently you don’t know many drama queens.
Vanzego is wonderful name and I’ll stand on Goad’s coffee table in my unshined Tony Lamas and say that.
Oh how I miss the good ol’ days when they just had names like Leroy & Dwayne…’twas a much simpler time….
Deference to the alleged hurt feelings of Blacks is the law and the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in 1954, in Brown v Board of Education, which has dictated the American way of life ever since.
Only the alleged hurt feelings of Blacks count. Whites have no feelings worthy of legal consideration, and mere material facts are irrelevant. Thus:
We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.
In Sweatt v. Painter, supra, in finding that a segregated law school for Negroes could not provide them equal educational opportunities, this Court relied in large part on “those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school.” In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, supra, the Court, in requiring that a Negro admitted to a white graduate school be treated like all other students, again resorted to intangible considerations: “. . . his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession.” Such considerations apply with added force to children in grade and high schools. To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs:
Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.
Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.
We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
From my own experiences with spellcheck the unusual name of the customer could easily have be changed to the more common monkeys. I always double check my texts before sending and even then some weird names slip through but so far no one seems to have been offended.
This was a mis-hearing of the name. As if, in this PC day & age and Floyd-level riots, any employee would deliberately print “Monkey” on the label, which he knew the buyer would see! Jeezus. Anyway, I love your colorful cartoon at the top. 🙂
If only the hapless upping fast food worker had spelled the name “Munkeese”….
If only the hapless young fast food worker had spelled the name “Munkeese”….
As a ref many years ago I heard one of my favorite black female names: Aquanetta
Who doesn’t like being named after hairspray?
“The negro cries out as he robs, rapes and burns down White cities” – old Southern proverb
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