A Black lawn care business owner recorded the moments when an older white woman turned down his services in the middle of an appointment allegedly because of his race.
TikTok user @heaintthatfunny posted a video showing his encounter with a white female homeowner in a residential neighborhood where he was contracted for lawn care services.
“She didn’t want Black people to mow her yard, y’all,” he narrates. “She didn’t know she was hiring Black people.”
The video pans back and forth between the woman on the street who appears to be calling the police and a view of her lawn, only part of which has been freshly cut.
“We’ve already started. Look how much we’ve cut already,” the man behind the cellphone states while showing the woman’s lawn.
In the video caption, the man wrote that the woman and a third-party company hired him to mow her yard weekly. During his encounter with the homeowner, he said she called him a “boy,” before declining further work on her yard.
The video shows the woman using her phone to snap a picture of the man’s license plate as they both wait for authorities to arrive.
The woman says nothing to him during the entire encounter but viewers can see her on her phone speaking in hushed tones.
“This is wild behavior. She didn’t know she was hiring Black people to cut her grass, so she threw a fit in front of my two sons out here,” the man states.
In a follow-up video, @heaintthatfunny told viewers that a police officer did show up and talked to him and the woman.
“The police came, he showed up. He was pretty cool. He came and talked to me first. I explained to him what happened and he immediately went and talked to her and got her story,” he explained.
After the officer took down the woman’s account, he returned and apologized to the business owner.
“He actually asked for my business card and said he would be calling me for services,” the man said, adding that he’s trying to build a company while working a full-time job. “I didn’t deserve for her to treat me like that. There is no defending her. Wrong is wrong.”
The business owner explained that the woman found him through a third-party app. His profile on the app shows his name, face, and a picture of his work vehicle. Yet, the woman hired him anyway.
The clip of the encounter earned more than 600,000 views on TikTok after it was posted in August.
“Wow, how disrespectful and disappointing,” one commenter wrote.
“I’m so sorry you had to deal with that tired old racism,” another person commented.
