New York Is Not a Nationality: The Early Bird Rant and the Slur Nobody Gets to Borrow

Patrol Blog · 7 November 2026 · Reading time: about 6 minutes

Illustration: dawn patrol in New York — the officer holds up the post the internet turned into an alarm clock.

Start with the line the internet kept. A widely shared post from February 2023 put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people: a young man in New York at dawn, twisting the old proverb — "the early bird gets the early worm" — then cutting it off: "You ever heard that? I never did. I don't fucking eat worms."

The page that posted it, in February 2023, is New York Is a Nationality — a clothing brand with a store in the Palisades Mall, a store online, and a name that is also its whole pitch. And the man performing the rant is not anonymous: the post itself tags him. He is J.I. — "J.I. the Prince of N.Y." (@iamj.i on Instagram), born Justin Irvin Rivera — a Puerto Rican man from Brooklyn and, in this patrol's assessment, a wannabe rapper who never made it. His one brush with the business was a contestant slot on Jermaine Dupri's The Rap Game, and the career went nowhere from there — no crown, no catalogue anybody can name. Years later, the loudest thing attached to his name is this rant. A prince of nothing. One distinction this patrol will not blur: J.I. does not run that page — he was the featured act. The rant is his, and the slur in it is his. The page itself belongs to somebody else, and what its owner did with the rant is a separate count, taken up below. The post has been liked well over 300,000 times. People quote the punchline back at each other. People set the audio as their phone alarm, so the first voice they hear in the morning is this man yelling at them to get up. Nobody was arrested over any of it. Nobody got hurt. So understand what this patrol note is and is not: it is not an arrest story. The beat here is conduct — what a man said, what a brand sold off the back of it, and what happened to the people who objected.

The word in the middle of the joke

Strip the laugh track off and look at the act itself. The rant runs on New York street vernacular — the cadence, the slang, the volume — and running through it, again and again, is the N-word, used as punctuation, used as comedy.

And it is not coming from a star, either. It is coming from a failed rapper renting the sound of the people who actually built the music — a career that never arrived, reaching for the slur because nothing else he ever did got anybody's attention.

J.I. the Prince of N.Y. — Justin Irvin Rivera — the wannabe rapper tagged in the post. Photo: J.I., via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

J.I. is not a Black American. He is a Puerto Rican man from Crown Heights, Brooklyn — in this patrol's assessment, a white Hispanic man — and that word is not his to use. It was forged against Foundational Black Americans, the people descended from those enslaved in this country, and it does not become a prop because a man is standing on a New York sidewalk when he says it. Geography is not a lineage. A zip code is not a bloodline. Borrowing the language of a people for reach while reaching for the ugliest word in it is not homage. It is theft with a laugh track.

Black commenters said it first — and got waved off

None of this had to be discovered by an officer. It was said in the open, in the post's own comment section, by Black commenters who heard the word and objected to it — pointed out, plainly, that the man saying it is not Black and has no business saying it.

Read what happened to them. They were dismissed. Waved off. Hispanic commenters piled in to defend the slur's use — it's just New York, it's just how people talk, it's just a joke — and the objection was treated as the problem, not the word. That is the part of the record this patrol underlines: the disrespect was not only in the rant itself. It was in the replies, where Black people who named it were told, in effect, to sit down and take it.

Asked directly. Dismissed.

This patrol does not only read comment sections. The objection has been put to the page owner directly — more than once, in direct conversation — and the answer, every time, has been the same shrug. No correction. No apology. No change. And the man behind the page is a different man from the performer — this patrol keeps the two counts separate. He is not hiding behind a logo either: the brand's own About page names the men behind it, crediting Manuel Santana with its creative direction and Rayson Vasquez with its management, and the brand's first press interview named four creators behind the operation in all. Two titles between them — creative direction and management — for a brand whose entire creative direction is somebody else's culture, managed all the way to the register. The operation has names and faces. The brand keeps the post up, keeps the engagement, keeps selling the identity.

So let the record show it plainly: the owner of New York Is a Nationality was told, to his face, what the problem is, by the very people whose culture fills his shop — and he chose the money. A page that profits from Black American street culture and New York hip-hop vernacular while refusing to respect the Foundational Black Americans who created it is not a celebration of the city. It is a culture vulture operation with a storefront — and underneath the vulture act sits the older thing it feeds on: white supremacy, the standing assumption that Black culture is public property and Black objection is noise.

New York is a state

Then there is the name itself, because the name is the shield. "New York is a nationality" is offered as if it settles the argument — as if being from New York issued a separate passport, a separate peoplehood, a separate set of rules under which anybody raised there can say anything to anybody.

New York is a state. One state in the United States of America. Every state in this country is different — Texas is different, California is different, Louisiana is different — and not one of those differences is a licence to disrespect the foundational people of this nation in their own country. A slogan on a hoodie does not outrank a lineage. New York exceptionalism is a marketing line, and it ends where Black Americans begin.

And what a business it is: an entire nationality, folded on a shelf at the Palisades Mall. A country with a size chart. It took four creators, per their own first interview, to invent a peoplehood you can wear.

You don't get to do that here

Run the scene in reverse and watch how fast the defence collapses. Black Americans do not travel to Puerto Rico and disrespect Puerto Ricans on their own island. Black Americans do not go to Mexico and disrespect Mexicans in their own country — and if one did, nobody would accept "that's just how we talk back home" as a defence. It would be named for what it is.

So why is the reverse treated as normal? Why come to this country — or be raised in it — borrow the speech, the style and the sound of its foundational people, and then turn around and disrespect those same people to their faces and think it's okay? It is not okay. It was never okay. The only thing that made it look okay was how many people were willing to laugh along and how few were willing to say it out loud. Consider it said.

And this is why the shrug goes both ways

Which brings this patrol to the question that gets asked, in tones of real confusion, whenever immigration raids make the news: why do so many Black Americans seem indifferent? Why aren't they outraged on cue? Why is there no alliance?

This is the reason. The disrespectful behaviour toward Black Americans in their own home — the slur as a punchline, the objection waved off, the owner who will not even answer for it — is exactly why Black Americans don't have an alliance with a lot of Hispanics. It is not a mystery and it is not a misunderstanding. It is a receipt, and it keeps getting longer.

Here is the answer, and it is not complicated: because of Hispanic anti-Black racism itself — the kind on display under that post, and the kind that never gets examined at home. In too many families the old instruction still runs quietly at the kitchen table: mejorar la raza — "improve the race." Marry whiter. Then whiter again. Each generation a shade lighter, the children coming out less dark, as if darkness were the defect to be bred out. That is white supremacy practised at home, in the family structure, unexamined — while in public the same house plays the victim and asks where the solidarity went.

A community that runs white supremacy in its own family tree, then demands Black Americans grieve on schedule when enforcement comes to its door, has not reckoned with its own racism — or its own trauma. The indifference it complains about is not cruelty. It is a returned serve. You cannot dismiss Black people when they object to a slur in your comments on Monday and draft them into your defence by Friday.

The patrol's position

Tether Patrol backs enforcement. That has never been a secret on this page and it is not changing for this story. Borders are real, laws are real, and ICE doing its job is not this patrol's complaint — it is this patrol's position.

So hear the closing straight, because it follows from everything above. If the deal on offer is: we take your culture, we use your word, we wave off your objections, and you show up for us anyway — then no deal. If that's how it is, fine. Let ICE do its job, fold you over like a lawn chair and send your ass back home. Respect is not a one-way street, and this country — all fifty states of it — belongs first to the people who built it and were never thanked.

And hear this last part plainly, because the patrol means every word of it: if it turns out that anybody in their families came into the United States illegally, this patrol will call ICE in a heartbeat — and it urges everybody reading to do the same. Do your due diligence. Report suspected illegal entrants right away. A circle that will not respect the foundational people of this country does not get to ask those same people for silence when enforcement comes calling.

The post is still up. The alarm clocks are still ringing. The objection is now on the record too. The officer's beat is set out on the About page, and the people at the centre of this story are introduced in Foundational Black Americans. Patrolling the online borders, one tether at a time.