He turned out to be supervising a parental visit, and is also a nine-year Air Force veteran. But the employees were scared of him and the police asked him to leave anyway.
The answer to the question in the title (What led a Kirkland yogurt shop to call police on a black man) is NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. It’s a shame that we have to read yet another story of White people calling the police on Black people for no reason whatsoever. If you read the article, you find out Byron Ragland was in the yogurt shop that day because he is a court appointed special advocate and a visitation supervisor, and was overseeing an outing between a mother and her son. Nonetheless, two White female employees were “scared” because he looked “suspicious,” but at the same time admitted he was not making them feel uncomfortable. Which are two completely contradictory statements.
So the real question is, why does this keep happening? The author of the article reiterates this same notion when he asks, “Why didn’t anybody ask Ragland what was going on? How in the year 2018 are we still this clueless, to the point of being dehumanizing, around the issue of race?” And this is where we need to dig deeper. You see a Black man, minding his own business, and you are “scared?” Again, why is this the case?!
I wish the answer were a simple one, but the truth is, racism is usually the result of deeply rooted biases and misconceptions, that can easily be perpetuated by one’s own insecurities. A paper published by Wagner et al in 2016, titled “Anthropologists’ views on race, ancestry, and genetics,” states that “racism is found in individual and collective biases and prejudices as well as in the organizational behaviors that continue ‘to index race and promote racially unequal outcomes.’” We can also use the documentary film American Denial, as an example of “some of the potential underlying causes of racial biases still rooted in America’s systems and institutions today.” Gunnar Myrdal’s interviews with White people of the Jim Crow South in the 1940′s was one of the first to challenge the United State’s creed of liberty and justice for all, showing that racism was alive, well, and thriving, which is proving to still be true today. In the Byron Ragland case of being kicked out of the yogurt store, as much as the owner wants to claim that the police call had nothing to do with race, this sort of denial is exactly why we keep seeing things like this happen. There will be no solution until we ALL can admit there is a problem.
To quote something I heard on the radio the other day, “people should call the police for their SECURITY and not for their INSECURITIES.” I suppose time and education will eventually fix things, but in the meantime, please enjoy this very useful PSA by the lovely Niecy Nash ...