My absolute favorite piece of writing this week is by New York Times charity case Charles Blow, who watched the hysterically funny Montgomery dock brawl and was nearly moved to tears thinking about slavery.
For the uninitiated, there was a blowout mob fight on an Alabama riverfront dock last Saturday after a mini cruise boat captain attempted to move a pontoon parked in his vessel’s way. The guy reportedly tried to physically push the pontoon by hand after alerting its passengers that they were in his commercial boat’s spot, and video shows them — roughly six people — responding by dogpiling the captain.
Because “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is all the rage, the event intensified by nature of the riverboat captain being black and the pontoon passengers all appearing to be white. In video footage, witnesses are heard screaming, “Help your brother!” and, “They wrong for that!”
More passersby, who were also black, came to defend the captain. One black male, identified as a 16-year-old, was seen diving into the water from a separate nearby boat and swimming to the dock, presumably to defend the captain as well. Video shows that eventually, black individuals outnumbered the white pontoon passengers in the brawl.
The entire thing is hilarious, starting with the riverboat captain’s animated toss of his hat into the air before barreling into his opponent. It spawned a billion memes, and the online consensus is that the pontoon passengers got what they deserved for ganging up on a man
