Last year, Avery Mills spoke about the Islamophobia that she had faced since converting and becoming famous.
This week, she described a harrowing encounter with bigots — but if you like schadenfreude, her story has a happy ending.
"I went to Walmart today and two workers were right beside me," Avery Mills’ original post begins.
She continues: "They began talking about how America isn’t what it used to be."
If you’re familiar with that kind of talk, it’s generally code for people who dream of a nation exclusively comprised of white, straight Christians.
Avery recalls that the workers were speaking of that "and how Trump needs to take out the trash and looked at me."
Avery explains why the workers, seeing her hijab, felt free to chat openly about how hateful they are.
"I stayed out of it and continued shopping and they assumed I didn’t speak English," she writes.
"And so they pointed at me," she adds, "and one of them said do you think she can even afford any of that."
"And the other one said maybe with her welfare check from our taxes," Avery recounts.
Words have very real consequences, Avery’s story reminds her followers.
"I called them out for it," she reveals.
"They tried to kiss my butt," Avery characterizes, "and [now] they no longer have jobs."
"Trump didn’t need to take out the trash because I did," her story concludes.
"This happened to me at Walmart today," Avery writes in a tweet, sharing a screenshot of the original post.
She remarks: "Thankfully though those 2 people can’t do it to other people there."
"They are right America isn’t what it used to be," Avery comments, noting that: "You can’t blatantly be prejudice at work anymore."
"It’s funny now," she concludes, "[Because] they will be living off of welfare with MY tax dollars"
A number of fans refused to believe Avery’s very believable account, with one Twitter denizen commenting: "#fakenews."
"Go tell the workers that were fired fake news," she advised the doubter.
Avery added: "I bet they would love that."
It appears that the commenter has since blocked her, but not deleted their tweet.
We don’t know how firing works at Walmart, but some fans have suggested that it may not be as simple as Avery’s story suggests.
Of course, sometimes managers just tell customers that an employee is or will be fired, then do not. We don’t know Walmart’s policies on that.
However, even if people would prefer to believe otherwise, racism like that happens all of the time.
When people think that they cannot be overheard or understood, they speak their minds — even when their thoughts are unspeakably vile.
Avery has spoken in the past about the hate that she has received, including death threats, simply for being a Muslim woman.
Some of her statements were in apparent refutation of Deavan Clegg’s insistence that America has very little racism.
One needs only to look at Avery’s replies on social media to see hateful monsters spewing bigoted bile at her.
And one needn’t be Muslim t overhear a store employee say cruel, Islamophobic things. Even I’ve witnessed that exact thing happen.
The one very fair critique of Avery’s post is that … that’s not how it works when people are fired.
Different states do things like unemployment in different ways, but that is paid from an insurance that employers pay, not by regular taxes.
Also, as much as we wish otherwise, welfare is not automatic. Somebody getting fired doesn’t translate to them getting automatic money.
Finally, a lot of Walmart employees are paid so little that, even while employed, they rely upon programs like food stamps just to survive.
Those details aside, however, Avery is right to make a stand against bigotry — not only for herself, but for others. Bigots should live in fear.
