Ritchie is a hard-working evening manager in a Baltimore City supermarket, tasked largely with stopping shoplifters—who have become brazen looters over the past two years.

This past Sunday, as the after church crowd had their orders checked out at the registers, an innocent, unarmed, oppressed teenager of perhaps 21, justly recovering some edible reparations from Ritchie’s employer, cradled that sack of frozen scrimps like a football and tried bulling right by Ritchie, who stood him up with a shoulder butt and confronted him, not letting the innocent victim of his white privilege make good his attempt at intergenerational, transmigratory justice.

As the office clerk called the police, Richie buckled down for the twenty-minute faceoff to come as the police took their good, goddamned time getting to him.

Over, and over, and over and over again, the frustrated thief, screamed, or growled, and sneered, and spat the same word in Ritchie’s pale face, “Nigger!”

For a full ten minutes this person of color called Ritchie a “nigger,” the specific usage of which has in recent years been applied by blacks in Baltimore to mean any male enemy, white or black.

Ritchie finally “had enough” and snapped, “Don’t call me niցցer!”

The thief’s friends and relatives were there to hear this racist slur, this breach of the Reparations Recovery Agent’s Civil Rights. The company is now facing between a 20-50K out of court settlement, their lawyer’s having advised them that they cannot win a civil court case.

Ritchie was written up and given a final warning before termination, to clean his act up and abide by community standards of tolerance and civil behavior—never minding that he had done exactly that.

His co-manager estimates that the real cost of this debacle is going to be about a half million a year in looting loss, as Ritchie stands down to save his job and lets the thieves walk on by.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival