When Jodi Doyle heard a neighbor refer to her mixed-race grandchildren as “colored kids,” she was unprepared for the flood of anger that swept over her.
“I said all the things, and I was angry. I had to take a beat,” she said in an August 3 TikTok video reflecting on the incident.
The day before, a white man had approached her in her grandchildren’s yard in Mount Vernon, Iowa. According to Doyle, he wanted to warn her about “some colored kids” he’d spotted on the property earlier that day, allegedly “starting mischief.”
‘Words Hold Weight’
It turned out the so-called mischief was cleaning up after a family bonfire from the night before. They had used walnut fruit as kindling, and her three grandchildren — ranging in age from 7 to 11 — were merely clearing away the leftover shells.
Doyle admitted that she initially cussed the neighbor out, off-camera. But then she reconsidered her approach.
“He needs to know. He needs to understand that his words hold weight,” she said, adding “not on my watch.” The Cedar Rapids native wanted to teach the man a lesson and recorded the entire encounter.
In the August 2 video, she told the man, whose face never appeared on camera, “Why would you? What makes you think it’s okay to use that term?”
After apologizing, the man offered the excuse that he didn’t realize that warning a white woman about “colored kids” could be construed as racist. “I didn’t know the proper term,” he said.
“I’m not racist by any means. I used the wrong terminology.” When asked how he thought it made the kids feel, he responded, “Probably the same as it does me… horrible.”
@jodi1111 Story time- First off thank you for all the love for Gigi’s babies! My video was the 2nd time I interacted with this man after I had calmed down and become somewhat civil. #fyp #blacktiktok #racism #grandma #message ♬ original sound – Jodi Doyle
‘People Still Talk Like This’
Viewers could practically sense Doyle’s eye-rolling off-camera, as she delivered some straight talk.
“To think that people still talk like this,” she said. “When you assume things like this, that is how young Black kids get shot for no reason on the streets by cops and by other people, and I’m being serious. You need to give those little boys the same damn grace that you would give some little white boys.”
@jodi1111 Trigger Warning- My grandkids and I made a bonfire last night and I had them pick up the walnut fruit out of the yard. This morning I was out back cleaning up while the boys were still sleeping and the man down the alley came over to let me know about the” ‘colored kids’ that were in my yard last night up to no good and mischief’ #fyp #theaudacity #blacktiktok #grandma #education ♬ original sound – Jodi Doyle
While the man framed the incident as a matter of semantics, viewers sided with Doyle.
A top comment read: “The sad part is, I guarantee you he wouldn’t have been so apologetic had their GG looked more like them. There’s no way that in 2026 he didn’t know ‘colored’ wasn’t an acceptable term.”
“And this is what we Black Americans go through daily,” added another person.
A third person weighed in, “He feels bad because he thought you would agree with him and got caught.”
For Doyle, the most disheartening part was that he wasn’t “even a boomer,” as she put it. “I don’t know his age, but I would say he’s a Gen Xer… he needed to be educated in that moment, and that’s what I tried to do.”
