I don’t want to link to it, but if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance that you’ve seen that horrible Holiday Inn Express video.
For the unacquainted, a video surfaced of an incident involving a customer and a front desk clerk at a Holiday Inn Express seemingly involving a botched reservation. Several users with large accounts tweeted out the video and played up the fact that the customer was black and the clerk was white. So upon initially seeing people comment, I assumed it was going to be the latest video that becomes a trigger for our ongoing national conversation about race in America. Instead, the video took a different turn.
In it, the customer can be seen pestering the clerk over his reaction to a reservation that somehow got messed up. The clerk is relatively quiet, until the customer reminds him he’s on camera. At that point, the clerk begins shaking, smacking himself in the face, and then hitting his head against the computer monitor. He tells the customer, “You ruined my whole life, man.” He then starts sobbing and wanders to a different area where he can’t be seen. The customer then walks around the counter to show the side of the clerk’s body, sloped forward, and weeping.
Like with most viral videos, we don’t know what came before or after, or anything about the context. Others on Twitter have speculated about various mental or emotional health issues that the clerk may have. It would not be responsible to diagnose anything based on this clip, but what we do know is that the clerk is clearly hurting, and going through an extremely difficult time.
It’s unconscionable to me that the customer would not only continue to film, but to go ahead and post it on the Internet. And then it’s absolutely cruel that anybody, especially somebody with a large following, would see the clip and decide the right response is to mock the clerk, and turn it into a racial issue.
The posting of the video is upsetting and enraging on multiple levels. But if there is one silver lining, it is that based on the reaction I’ve seen, it appears that there has been widespread revulsion at those who posted and mocked the clerk, and there has been a lot of compassion for what the worker has to be going through. I hope, whoever he is and wherever he is, that he has somebody to support him and get him help.