Duke University coffee shop employees fired for playing Young Dolph song

Two employees of Duke University’s Joe Van Gogh location were fired after vice president for student affairs Larry Moneta went into the coffee shop this past Friday and found the Young Dolph song the baristas were playing to be “inappropriate.” Via Durham’s Indy Week:

On Friday, Moneta came in during an afternoon rush. The baristas had a habit of playing music from Spotify over the speakers, usually on playlists curated by the service. When Moneta walked in, “Get Paid” by Young Dolph was playing. The song’s titular refrain included the n-word, as Young Dolph raps, “Get paid, young nigga.”

Britni Brown, who was manning the register, was in charge of the playlist that day.

When he approached the counter, Moneta, a white man, told Brown, an African-American woman, that the song was inappropriate.

“The words, ‘I’ll eff you upside down,’ are inappropriate,” Moneta said, according to Brown. (Those exact lyrics are not in the song, though it has plenty of f-bombs.)

“Yes, of course,” Brown said. She says she shut the song off immediately. She grabbed him a vegan muffin and offered it free of charge.

“No,” Brown recalls Moneta saying. “Ring me up for it.”

The other barista on duty that day, Kevin Simmons, later stated that Moneta was “verbally harassing” Brown. Both Brown and Simmons were fired after Amanda Wiley from Joe Van Gogh’s human resources department received a call from executive director of dining services Robert Coffey and was “instructed […] to terminate the employees that were working that day,” according to an audio recording of Brown and Simmons’ meeting with Wiley obtained by the INDY. “Joe Van Gogh is contracted by Duke University, so we essentially work for them. And they can shut us down at any point,” Wiley said.

Brown was also quoted saying, “For [Simmons, a white man] to be fired because of this, it is not fair. I feel like you guys were trying to cover it up as to make it not look discriminatory for firing a person of color.” Wiley responded, “This is coming from the university.”

Though the audio recording showed Wiley saying she was instructed to fire both employees, Moneta denied this in an email to Duke Chronicle, saying. “The employees who chose to play the song in a business establishment on the Duke campus made a poor decision which was conveyed to the JVG management. How they responded to the employees’ behavior was solely at their discretion.”