A bar manager in Spokane, Washington was trying to defend his coworker from bigots yelling the n-word at him last week — and became the target of the racists’ ire.

As Washington’s KHQ station reports, the manager, Jade Cardwell, was sticking up for a black bartender against two unruly customers before the situation escalated to violence.

“Right away, when they came in, they were dropping the N word,” Cardwell said. “We have a black bar tender we just employed. We weren’t having it. We wanted them gone.”

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Cardwell said that normally when customers want to take it outside, bartenders at his restaurant are allowed to follow them to the door and then close it behind them once they exit — but the men physically dragged him by his clothes before he could do so.

“One of them ripped my hair out, ripped my shirt,” Cardwell said, as they dragged him towards their car.

“Two 6ft tall guys came into our bar, used hate speech, ripped a chunk of hair out of my head, tore my shirt off, punched a coworker in the face, broke my nose and pulled a knife and threatened 6 of us that we were gonna get stabbed,” Cardwell wrote on Facebook.

“I’m going in for surgery today,” he told KHQ earlier on Wednesday. “They have to put my naval cavity back together.”

On Facebook, Cardwell said that despite informing the Spokane Police Department immediately of the assault, he felt that “the officers were not interested,” and said they still haven’t found the men, who had Idaho plates. He provided police with security footage of the men and their plate numbers.

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Cardwell said he is “sleeping about an hour or two a night, [has] constant headaches, can’t breathe out of my nose due to the fact that my septum is displaced in the nasal cavity.”