Woman slaps customer in Phoenix store who berated her with racist language in viral video
Joshua Bowling / Arizona Republic
PHOENIX — It was the slap heard around the world.
A viral video showed a woman in a Phoenix convenience store slap another woman, who is white, for berating her with racist language and grabbing her.
The video shows the white woman in a gas station convenience store telling a customer checking out at the cash register, identified in the post as Karina Rodriguez, that she wasn't welcome in the store and needed to "go back to your country."
The video was posted on Facebook on Saturday by Greg Conn. Since then, it's garnered nearly 10,000 reactions, 17,000 shares and 7,000 comments. That's to say nothing of the hundreds of Twitter accounts reposting the video.
As Conn filmed the interaction on his phone, the unidentified white woman came up to him and said "you need to leave, you're not a part of this," before going back to Rodriguez and asking her where she was born.
"I was born in America, b----, where are your ancestors from?" Rodriguez answers. As Rodriguez and a man with her grab their bag from the checkout counter and head for the door, the white woman tells Rodriguez she's ''going back to Mexico" and grabs her arm, telling Rodriguez to ''keep your hands of me.''
Rodriguez then slaps her in the face.
"You deserved it, in my opinion," Conn can be heard saying to the white woman as she leaves.
The video does not clearly show whether Rodriguez in some way touched the woman as she claimed, but it's clear the woman was making repeated racial remarks to Rodriguez as she was checking out and demanded the clerk not serve her before things became physical.
The gas station was a Shell in north Phoenix, according to the Facebook post.
"Racism is alive and well," Conn said in his Facebook post.
The white woman came into the convenience store "yelling at the clerk to get another clerk to help because the line was getting long," Conn's post says. When another employee came to the cash registers, the white woman told Rodriguez to check out, his post says.
"(Rodriguez) said 'Thank you but I don't need your assistance,'" the post says. "At this time the lady told the clerk not to serve her, told her she can leave, and go back to her country. That's when I took out my phone, and the rest is here in the video."
Follow Joshua Bowling on Twitter @MrJoshuaBowling.