Cinnabon Fired an Employee for a Racist Tirade Caught on Video. The Story Gets Uglier From There.

Molly Olmstead, Slate

You can make a lot of money by being a self-declared racist on camera.

On Friday, in a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Somali American couple was out shopping at an indoor mall when they decided to stop by Cinnabon. It’s not completely clear how the interaction with the Cinnabon employee first became heated, but the TikTok user who uploaded the video said her cousin, the female customer in the video, had asked for more caramel on her cinnamon roll. The worker, a white woman, responded by insulting the woman’s hijab, according to the TikTok user, saying the customer could see her “squeezing [the caramel] through that witchcraft bandana.”

The exchange that followed, as captured on video, turned uglier once the employee, Crystal Wilsey, noticed she was being filmed: “I am racist, and you are a n—r,” Wilsey says, while leaning across the counter. “I am racist, and I’ll say that to the whole entire world. Don’t be disrespectful.” Wilsey then extended her middle fingers to the customers, told them to “suck it,” and called the female customer ugly. “You know damn well you’re fucking evil fucks,” she said. Video of the incident went viral, and Cinnabon has since fired Wilsey.

In a normal world (or even in the world of a couple years ago), that would be the end of the story, or at least pretty close to it. Wilsey’s story is not particularly remarkable: We know there are proudly racist individuals living in the U.S. She’s also not a powerful figure—she certainly can’t set public policy—meaning her firing from a Wisconsin Cinnabon would hardly be newsworthy. A different video of the incident, later published by TMZ, showed Wilsey making irrational claims, accusing the customer of having come up to her earlier in a white-face disguise.

There also wouldn’t be much to debate: There was recently a near-universal consensus that racial slurs were to be met with condemnation. People could still deploy all sorts of dog-whistles to hint at their views, but slurs—and certainly the self-proclaimed racism—were relegated to the fringes of the discourse.

But these are not normal times, and that near-consensus is thoroughly broken: On GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform typically used for more conservative causes, “Stand with Crystal” has raised more than $113,000 in donations. A fundraiser for the Somali American couple’s legal fees, in contrast, has raised less than $5,000 [Editor’s note: now $16,000].

Omstead describes how this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.

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