These women were embarrassed, degraded and two of them have lost their jobs as a result of this Napa Valley train company.
It is great to see these women ban together and decide to fight back against the racist culture that is readily accepted in everyday America. The undertone of kicking these worthy black women off the Napa Valley Wine tour train was nasty racism that says ‘you black people don’t belong here.’
They were kicked of the train for ‘laughing while black’ and are firing back with an $11 million dollar racial discrimination lawsuit against the train company.
“We feel it is really important for us to speak up,” Lisa Renee Johnson, a member of the book club, told the Guardian on Thursday.
“Racism is something we are going through as a country. We hope that as a result of this [lawsuit], people will start to look more at their internal biases.”
The 11 women – 10 black and one white, ranging in age from their 50s to 85 – said that on 22 August they felt severely humiliated when they were marched off the train “as if we were criminals” and handed over to four waiting armed police officers.
Johnson said two of the women have also lost their jobs – as a nurse and a financial services executive – as a result of the media furore surrounding the incident.
“We were a book club going out for the day to celebrate a birthday, and we ended up being left in a dirt lot just because someone thought we didn’t deserve to be in a white space,” said Johnson, who chronicled the incident in real time on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #laughingwhileblack.
“We want people to realise that this is our life and there have been very serious repercussions.”
This world we live in don’t listen until you impact their money. Therefore, this is a wonderful decision by the lady because it will drive attention to their ways in Napa Valley and hopefully embolden more in the community to stop turning the other cheek to racism and FIGHT BACK!
To read more on the story, you can here on The Guardian.
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