An apparent drunk, white man shouting racist obscenities was forcefully removed from a New York City subway car by irate passengers over the weekend.
Video of the Saturday afternoon incident captures the man in the midst of calling a group of black people the n-word repeatedly. As the clip begins, the man can be heard saying:
I talk shit because I know I can. Because I’m a lawyer. I went to NYU Law. Fuck you! I didn’t do anything to you. What are you doing?
At that point, another passenger interjects, and says, “You’re doing something to everybody on this train.” This prompts the Lime-A-Rita-drinking self-described lawyer to proclaim, “Who cares?!” He then dances and prances around, singing a few bars of an indistinguishable song before saying, “[N-word], [n-word], [n-word], [n-word], [n-word],[n-word], [n-word], [n-word]! Fuck you!”
After his racially charged outburst, the man is confronted by a black passenger who threatens to punch him in the face.
The man then shrugs and says, “That’s assault. Assault.”
Other passengers speak up, daring the man to repeat the slurs. He decides against that. Then an off-screen woman begins to call him a racist. Being called a racist prompts a clarification, however, as the man says, “I’m a legal scholar. I’m a legal scholar.”
As people shout and talk simultaneously, the words become hard to understand for awhile. Then the man can be heard, saying, “Beat me up. Beat me up! Beat me up and show your fucking small-mindedness.” The other riders dismiss the man’s taunts, but then he starts in again, saying “You’re weak. You can’t think! You can’t think! You made a fool of yourself!”
Next, the man notices that someone is apparently doing something to his bag–which is resting a few feet away behind the group of black passengers. He screams for someone to return his bag and says things about his property. He asks for it back. No one complies.
A bespectacled passenger says, “Fuck your bag, dude.” The man replies, “Fuck my bag? Why?” To which the glasses-wearing man simply states, “You’re done.”
Then the subway doors open.
As straphangers file on and off, the man is forcibly removed from the train by a group of fed up passengers. After a couple of attempts to toss him off, the man lands in the middle of the platform at the Bedford L Train station. Upset, he launches the remainder of his Lime-A-Rita into the man who had been scolding him for most of the video then attempts to re-board the train. This was a mistake on the man’s part.
As the offending man lumbers forward, continuing to bemoan the loss of his property, a flurry of hands resists his entrance. He yells some more. Then the man is shoved back again as a canister of yellow soup connects with his head and left shoulder.
He makes a few more attempts but is finally stopped from returning to the train as an older white woman smashes a red glass bottle right next to him. This hushes the train’s passengers as well. As the man walks away, he shouts out the n-word one final time.
LawNewz reached out to NYU Law in order to confirm whether the man in the video actually attended school there. Initially, NYU Law was unable to identify the man and therefore could not state with certainty whether he had or had not attended the law school.
After press reports later surfaced identifying the man as one “Paul Lawson,” NYU Law officials were unable to find a record of anyone with such a name ever having been a student there.
[image via screengrab]
Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include responses from NYU Law.
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