Clippers star Norman Powell harassed by white woman who said he wasn’t American
The athlete took to Instagram on Tuesday afternoon to livestream the encounter
Los Angeles Clippers star Norman Powell had to get a woman together during his gym workout in Las Vegas.
Powell took to Instagram on Tuesday afternoon to livestream his encounter with an unnamed white woman who harassed the athlete and his friends. According to TMZ, the woman did not like the music they were playing so she berated the group and told Powell that he was not an American.
“She came here the first time and was saying she got in a fight,” Powell explained, according to TMZ. “We told her to leave out the back. She left, she was gone for about 15, 20 minutes, came back, staying in the gym calling us un-American, saying we need to go back, calling us p—, a whole bunch of s—.”
“We was trying to get her to leave, and then she was trying to take her pants off and take a s— or piss on the floor,” he continued, as reported by NewsOne. “And that’s when we pulled her out like, we can’t have that.”
The woman can be heard saying to Powell, “You’re not American.”
“How am I not American?” Powell asked in response. “I was born and raised here.”
The woman then rants about how she was once a slave and that her “family came here on the Mayflower.”
When asked “How were you a slave?” the woman replied, “Because I was Black and my last name is Howard.”
The cops were ultimately called and the woman complained as she was handcuffed and detained by Las Vegas police. In Powell’s footage, she can be heard yelling, “I can’t breathe,” while police have her pinned against the squad car.
Eric Garner’s last words were “I can’t breathe” before he died after being put in an illegal chokehold by former New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014. The phrase has since been associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
As the white woman in Powell’s video repeatedly shouts, “I can’t breathe,” he remarks, “That is crazy to me, man. That s— is not funny, man,” Powell said.
The woman was reportedly issued a misdemeanor citation at the scene for obstruction and then taken to a local hospital on a psychiatric hold.
One Twitter user responded to the clip, “Why did I know that most of us could’ve drawn an accurate picture of this woman before she was ever revealed to us on camera lmao.”
