Posted on 08/25/2015 7:35:06 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Getting wine-drunk on a train in Napa Valley sounds pretty good if you're the guys from Sideways or the parents in Bob's Burgers, but it's apparently a lot less fun if you're a black woman with a loud laugh.
A group of 11 women, members of the Sistahs on the Edge book club, were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train last Saturday for allegedly being too loud and disturbing other passengers—but the women say it was because of their race.
One of the book club's members, Lisa Johnson, chronicled the event on Facebook, igniting an outcry across social media and inspiring the hashtag #LaughingWhileBlack.
"I felt like it was a racist attack on us," Johnson later told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We were being singled out."
According to Johnson, the train's manager approached the group—which included an 83-year-old grandmother—and said that the ladies would have to leave if they "didn't tone it down."
"The train is set up to be with your friends, to drink wine, and to have a good time ... We were thinking, 'Who are we offending?'"
The real humiliation, said Johnson, came from being escorted on a "walk of shame" through the rest of the train cars before the women were asked to leave at the next train station stop.
The Napa Valley Wine Train gave each of the women a full refund after the fact, but Johnson is holding out for "a public apology for the humiliations they caused to us as professional women." They are considering taking legal action.
According to the Chronicle, Sam Singer—a spokesperson for the company—maintains that the incident "wasn't an issue of bias. It was an issue of noise."
The Napa Valley Wine Train did not immediately return VICE's request for comment.
No one cares whether you are drunk in public or not, until you start being a loud, impossible to ignore, public nuisance.
These women obviously have strong feelings of entitlement.
Three warnings....THREE!
You seem to believe anyone can be as loud and obnoxious as they want and it doesn’t matter if others complain.
NeNe syndrome.
Rude public behavior is basic to black privilege
Professional women?
AA professional women.
I suspect that my definition of "loud and obnoxious" is a little different from the definition held by snooty white liberals on a wine tasting train.
Bullstuff. Other customers complained. The conductor asked them to tone it down several times. They did not. Why should they be allowed to ruin the other paying customers’ experience?
Sadly, this Napa Train/Wine business will be issuing apology in the coming days. I wish people would stop bowing to these RACISTS and tell them to go pound sand!
Every time people apologize so as not to be labeled a racist, these bullies are emboldened to keep crying racism where none actually exists.
Anybody want to bet these Black “Ladies” planned this little incident out beforehand just so they could play the race card? Don’t doubt it!
“You better be respectin’ me YO!”
"Who are we offending?"
Everyone else on the train genius.
I guess they were classy enough to drink wine and not brawl like some do at McDs.
The first, and only, time I saw a movie at the old Union Station theaters in DC (late 1980s) the manager (who happened to be Black) came into the theater before the coming attractions and in a VERY military style command voice informed the audience that people had paid to watch and enjoy a movie and that disruptive behavior during the show would not be tolerated and would result in removal.
I’m sure that he did that based on experience.
Now I don’t buy that these women were drunk. It seems to me that there was a simple clash of cultures. Which happens, more often than not regardless of anything related to race.
Question is, in the event of such conflict, which culture has it’s sensibilities shown deference, which culture shows deference and what the rules and mechanisms are for how that gets determined.
It’s best to have well defined, explicitly stated, policies in effect upfront.
It wouldn't have mattered why the train's operator put the drunk women off. If they had been put off for assaulting the conductor with a baseball bat they would have blamed it on racial discrimination.
Attempting to kill a white cop in Ferguson MO wasn't a crime you see, the black "victim" of white hatred was only defending himself against a uniformed white bigot who was trying to kill him. The same holds true for the poor crippled black "yute" in Baltimore who was murdered in a police van by biased white cops because of his skin color.
Unless you get the real facts according to the poor helpless victims of racial discrimination, you can't understand why these atrocities keep happening.
Loud blacks are the reason my wife and I do not go to Buffet style restaurants! They are loud and looking for attention, “hey look at us”!
Oh I thought it read movie theater. I thought it was the same bunch that goes to every movie I see.
I wonder what “we be sisters “ think of them...
Conductor’s car on Friday Newark departure on the Raritan Valley was that way... as it should be. If you didn’t enjoy the jokes and good times, you simply sat in another car.
Ok, how many in this group think this whole kerfuffle was intentional? Napa Wine Train has deeeeeeep pockets!
It's almost as though it's a plot to keep other people down.
De Toqueville remarked that one of the main problems that freed blacks faced was that they learned from their masters how to behave like violent, drunken aristocrats when they didn't have the means to live that way. Looks like that's still true.
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