A group allegedly made monkey sounds at Black women outside a Nashville bar, then claimed it was ‘a joke’ when confronted

A woman visiting Nashville says a night out with friends turned into a racist confrontation after a group of strangers made monkey sounds at her and her friends, all of whom are Black. According to The Nerd Stash, the woman, who posts as Momas, described the trip overall as fun, but said there was a “little hiccup” partway through.

She says the group was packed into a busy street scene near a bar entrance when a cluster of strangers nearby started making monkey noises toward them, while she and her friends were, in her words, “minding their business, dancing and having a blast.”

Rather than let it go, she began recording and directly confronting the group, yelling, “You called us monkeys?!” One woman from the group walked over and crowded into her space, seemingly hoping to make her put the camera away. She didn’t back down, eventually turning her attention to a specific man she identified as responsible, shouting, “He called us monkeys!”

He denied it, then the group closed ranks around him

The man denied knowing what she meant, responding only with “What?” When she called him a racist directly, others in the group jumped to defend him. The same woman who’d confronted her earlier shouted back, “It was a joke!” She shot back, “It’s a joke that he’s racist?!”

Reaction to the video leaned heavily in her favor. One commenter asked, “Oh, so the women needed to defend him?” Another wrote, “Make them uncomfortable every time! No room for any disrespect.” A third commented on the man’s demeanor in the clip, writing, “And he know he guilty asf just from how he looking.” A fourth pushed back on the “joke” excuse directly, writing, “‘It’s a joke,’ jokes are supposed to be funny.”

This reaction reflects a long, well-documented history associated with that specific gesture. According to The Conversation, comparisons between Black people and apes date back to well before Darwin’s era and were used for generations as a means of arguing that Black people were less than fully human, a history that scholars indicate is the reason such imagery continues to be regarded as a serious insult rather than a joke.

A comparable incident recently drew similar backlash when a North Carolina woman said she was harassed for nearly 30 minutes by a stranger in what many viewers called a racially motivated rant. None of the individuals in the Nashville video have been identified, and the specifics of the encounter have not been independently verified beyond what’s shown in the footage itself.