The video begins with a delivery worker of color, off-camera, telling a man to put his mask on in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood.
“I’m outside, I don’t need a mask,” he responds, before their back-and-forth launches into a larger tirade over the divides of race and class across San Francisco.
The man, wearing a blue zip-up jacket and black New Balance sneakers, harangues the delivery driver over identification, pulling out his phone at one point to take a picture.
“Who are you?”
The driver, audibly frustrated, replies, “Who the f—k are you? Why are you in my business?”
“Every time I come around here,” he added, “motherf—kers like you make my job harder.”
The deliveryman, who shared the video Wednesday through the Instagram account for the mutual aid organization Lost Soul Courier Collective, said in the post description that he was delivering naloxone — an emergency harm reduction medication used to counteract opioid overdoses. Opioid overdoses have risen over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, as cities nationwide grapple with an increase in opioid use and fentanyl-laced cocaine and heroin.
The man, who identifies himself as John, repeatedly asks what the boxes are for, who they’re addressed to and why the man is in the neighborhood. He later explains that there have been a spate of missing boxes in the area and pulls out his phone, hands trembling, to capture a photo or video of the deliveryman.
But the deliveryman says he sees right through John’s reasoning.
“Don’t think I don’t know why you came over here and stopped me,” he said, “because you think I belong in another neighborhood, right? F—k yourself.”
The deliveryman later points out that these sorts of interactions, in which a so-called “Karen” harasses Black and brown people and later threatens police interference, leads to undue harm. (Cases like New York woman Amy Cooper, who recently sued her employer for discrimination, and California woman Miya Ponsetto, also known as the “SoHo Karen,” come to mind.)
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