White History Month Isn’t Going to Pay For Itself You Know
A deli owner claims the backlash against the “white history month” sign he displayed in his store window during March has put him out of business. So he’s following in the footsteps of that anti-gay-marriage pizza place by asking for money on GoFundMe.
Jimbo Boggess writes on his donation page that after he put up the controversial sign at his Flemington, N.J. business, “the bottom dropped out and customers were no longer coming into my deli, and now I am forced to close down my Deli and lose my American dream.”
Despite personally apologizing to Bhakti Curtis, the mixed-raced customer who first spotted and criticized the sign, Boggess still seems to regret the consequences of posting “CELEBRATE YOUR WHITE HERITAGE IN MARCH, WHITE HISTORY MONTH” more than he regrets the sign itself.
“I had to take the sign down for various reasons. It was only supposed to be a white thing, but people read more into it than that,” he wrote on GoFundMe. “I don’t think I deserve this just because I wanted to be proud of being white and be able to celebrate my heritage like everyone else does.”
Sounds like he learned a lot from this incident.
Boggess claims he received supportive letters from all over the U.S. (both he and Curtis, and even some of the reporters covering the story, also got hate mail), but it seems none of his supporters live in Flemington and want sandwiches.
Apparently in response to commenters who feel his request for donations is a con—a reasonable thing to wonder about post-Pizzaghazi—he revealed that, “Yes, you guys are right, the store wasn’t doing good before the sign was posted. But it was doing good enough to keep the store open . After the sign was posted I started only ringing up 23 to 40. Dollars a day.”
So far, he’s raised $215 over 4 days, a far cry from the half-million the owners of Memories Pizza collected before they disappeared.
America’s third consecutive White History Century is ongoing.
