Obnoxious Black Women Kicked Off Of A Train For Being Too Loud Blame Racism
Brian Anderson
August 24, 2015
The awesome thing about racism is that it absolves some people from any personal responsibility. If you’re acting like an idiot and someone gets offended, instead of apologizing, you cry racism and suddenly your behavior is no longer the issue. A group of black women made this work for them after they were kicked off of a train for being loud and obnoxious.
The SF Gate reports that Lisa Johnson and her black middle-aged book club took a train ride through California wine country Saturday. Dressed in matching t-shirts the women embarked on an 18-mile trip through the Napa Valley’s picturesque vineyards. It’s the kind of trip that yuppies and old people take, so it’s safe to say this isn’t exactly a party train. Well, that is, for most people.
They do serve wine on the train, but there’s a difference between wine tasting and wine chugging. The black women were laughing loudly and being generally obnoxious. Johnson claims she and her group were not drunk, but admits they were “rambunctious.”
Eventually other passengers started to complain. One female passenger told the black women “this isn’t a bar,” to which Johnson responded, “um, yes it is.”
The train manager approached the women and asked them to please be quiet. They apparently didn’t give a crap that they were making a spectacle of themselves and being inconsiderate to other passengers as they continued to be loud and obnoxious. The manager came over again and told them if they didn’t “tone it down” they would be asked to leave the train. Again they didn’t care and kept acting like jerks to everyone around them.
After complaints and two warnings from the manager, the women were kicked off the train at the next stop. Johnson called it a “walk of shame” as she and the other black women were escorted from the train.
“People were looking at us. To get escorted into the hands of waiting police officers. That’s the humiliating part,” said Johnson.
It turns out the police just happened to be at the stop and weren’t there to arrest the women, but it makes it sound worse when Johnson says she and her friends were taken into custody. It’s absolutely not true.
Anyways, here’s how the train company saw things:
In a statement Sunday, Napa Valley Wine Train spokeswoman Kira Devitt said the company “received complaints from several parties in the same car and after three attempts from staff, requesting that the group keep the noise to an acceptable level, they were removed from the train and offered transportation back to the station in Napa.”
“The Napa Valley Wine Train does not enjoy removing guests from our trains, but takes these things very seriously in order to ensure the enjoyment and safety of all of our guests,” Devitt said, adding that about once a month guests need to be removed from the train.
And then in a now-deleted FaceBook post someone from the company wrote this:
Following verbal and physical abuse toward other guests and staff, it was necessary to get our police involved. Many groups come on board and celebrate. When those celebrations impact our other guests, we do intervene.
Now matter how you look at it these women were obnoxious and hostile to other passengers and crew, but Johnson has a different take:
“It was humiliating. I’m really offended to be quite honest. I felt like it was a racist attack on us. I feel like we were being singled out,” said Johnson.
Accounts and pictures of the episode have been spreading across social media, spawning the hashtag #LaughingWhileBlack while the women involved have questioned whether they would have been treated differently if they were not African American.
Clearly the non-African American passengers knew how to conduct themselves in public. These women weren’t kicked off the train because of the color of their skin; they got the boot for their behavior.
Proving the “cry racism” ploy works every time, the train company gave the women a full refund and a free bus ride back to their point of origin. Of course this is not enough and the women would also like a public apology. Can a lawsuit be far behind?
http://downtrend.com/71superb/obnoxious-black-women-kicked-off-of-a-train-for-being-too-loud-blame-racism
