Showing solidarity with victims of discrimination


I showed a nice cartoon earlier that suggested a good way to respond if you see someone being harassed. I later saw this news story in which people responded pretty much the same way when a woman in a store who was wearing a hijab came in for abuse from another person.

Shoppers at a Smith’s grocery store in Albuquerque, NM Thursday ran to the defense of a woman wearing a hijab as another female customer verbally accosted her, KRQE News 13 reports.

“I went down the aisle to go get sodas and then all of a sudden I hear somebody starting to yell at her,” Barney Lopez, who was grocery shopping for his evening dinner, told the news station.

“They’re saying things like ‘Get out of our country, you don’t belong here, you’re a terrorist!’”

Lopez said shoppers converged on the scene to defend the woman wearing a hijab, with one employee positioning himself between the woman and her attacker.

“There was even another woman that like went over to the woman in the hijab and put her arm around her and gave her hug and held her while the Smith’s employees came,” he said, noting the other ‘employees shuffled the shouting lady out of the store.”

This is the way to combat ugliness. The people who behave in this despicable way need to realize that it is they who are the outcasts, not the people they harass.

Comments

  1. jrkrideau says

    Well, cross the USA off my tourist destinations for the foreseeable future.

    Good work by the customers and employees.

  2. deepak shetty says

    The people who behave in this despicable way need to realize that it is they who are the outcasts, not the people they harass.

    Except that these outcasts command an electoral college majority

  3. Trickster Goddess says

    I’ve seen several of these stories come around this week, and I am glad to see them and I hope they will encourage and empower others to act likewise when they see such things happen. This is how we get through this.

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