Black San Antonio Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez is tangling with woman online after she referred to him as a “monkey” in a post voicing frustration with his office.
The councilman responded by tagging the woman, Trisha Thatcher-Garza, in a Wednesday evening Facebook post containing a screen shot of her comment.
“Referring to me as a monkey is CRAZY lmao,” the District 2 councilman said. “Racist.”
The screenshot was of an earlier Facebook post from Thatcher-Garza where she complained about an alleged lack of response from McKee-Rodriguez’s office.
“I wrote him regarding an 94 yr old woman on Cactus being exploited and robbed by a family who receives city $$$ to revitalize the Eastside and this monkey mfkr never responded nor did anyone from district 2,” she said in the post.
In his response, McKee-Rodriguez also noted that his office did respond to Thatcher-Garza’s complaint in 2024 and advised her to seek legal aid. He attached a purported screenshot of his office’s reply, which recommended that she reach out to the nonprofit Rio Grande Legal Aid for free assistance.
In subsequent comments, Thatcher-Garza insisted she isn’t racist, adding that the 94-year-old woman in question is African American. Thatcher-Garza even said she has friends and family members who are Black in San Antonio’s historically Black East Side.
In a post on her own Facebook profile, Thatcher-Garza also added that she calls her kids monkeys all the time, adding that, to her, the term isn’t racist but meant to indicate “a circus, a sideshow.”
Several people responding online rejected her explanation.
“You think anyone is going to understand a commonly used word by racist[s], is being used in good faith by you???” Facebook user Osaze Edebiri fired back. “Frustration about a situation is one thing [sic] how did you not stop and think about how what you said might look to people who don’t know your family? (assuming that is a valid argument).”
A woman purporting to be Thatcher’s cousin added gasoline to the dumpster fire in the comments, calling McKee-Rodriguez a “bitch ass piece of shit” and a “low-vibration piece of shit.”
“I’ll slap all you bitchs [sic] behind my cousin and that’s on everything tf,” she added.
The social media firestorm comes amid heightened racial tensions during the Trump administration, and the president himself has frequently fanned the flames. In February, Trump received backlash for posting an AI video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
Following public outcry, the Truth Social post was later deleted.
U.S. House Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, was removed from Trump’s Feb. 24 State of the Union speech for responding to the video by holding up a sign reading “Black people aren’t apes!”
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