’16 tirade on a faux ‘foreigner’
WHEN A viral video exposed the racist rants of a Manhattan lawyer, Willie Morris soon realized he’d heard it all before.
Morris, 34, identified the hate-filled attorney as the same man who inexplicably barged into him on a Fifth Ave. sidewalk before launching a similar tirade in October 2016.
“It hit me — I know this face,” the Manhattan entrepreneur told the Daily News one day after Aaron Schlossberg’s mug was splashed across the internet.
“I closed my eyes just to hear the voice and I was like, ‘That’s the exact same person.’ ”
Morris (photo) said he’d forgotten about the bizarre encounter until Schlossberg’s face appeared Wednesday in his Twitter feed.
Morris dug out the 19-month-old video and quickly confirmed it was the same guy making the same type of hate-filled remarks about immigrants.
“What country you from?” Schlossberg demands after slamming into Morris, who was walking with his girlfriend. “I’m gonna call the police. You don’t run into people.
“I’m a citizen here, you’re not,” he continued. “You’re an ugly f---ing foreigner, so f--you. You’re not allowed to walk on the wrong side of the street, bump into a lawyer.”
In a funky footnote to the strange encounter, Schlossberg proved amazingly colorblind for a xenophobic racist.
“I was born in Massachusetts, I grew up in West Virginia, I went to school in Alabama,” said Morris. “I’m, like, pretty white. I don’t know. Maybe it was the fact that I had a man bun at the time.”
Morris said the whole thing made no sense, with the two men making eye contact before Schlossberg “automatically starts going nuts . . . I was just so in shock of what was going on.”
Morris, despite the strange encounter, still offered the angry attorney a bit of advice: “Get help.”