Women Kicked Off Napa Valley Wine Train For #LaughingWhileBlack

The Napa Valley Register and the Chronicle have picked up the story after 47-year-old Lisa Johnson of Antioch created a social media firestorm in the wake of the incident.

Later, the maître d’hotel came by a second time, warning the women they would be ordered off the train if they didn’t quiet down, Johnson said. Of course, it is possible these women were being disruptive (Devitt added that train management has to remove passengers about once a month), but it is hard to ignore the apparent racism in this case.

The group, which included an 83-year-old grandmother, was ready to relax on the 18-mile journey from Napa to St. Helena, SFGate.com reports.

“People were looking at us”, said Johnson.

“I’m really offended to be quite honest”, book club member Lisa Johnson, 47, told the Chronicle.

During the tour, the group was advised that they would have to get off the train because they were being too loud and other passengers were complaining. Later, spokeswoman Kira Devitt said that her company had “received complaints from several parties in the same vehicle 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”.

Interestingly enough, the Napa Valley Wine Train serves, well, wine.

That’s when Johnson jumped in to set the record straight, using a hashtag to alert others of her book club’s “crime” of #laughingwhileblack – but thus far, the Napa Valley Wine Train hasn’t responded, save for its initial statement.

The terms “driving while black” and “shopping while black” were already fixtures of an indefinite discussion about race relations and stereotypes in the U.S. before a group of African-American women in Napa, California, helped coin a new term over the weekend.

According to the Chronicle, the women-who were seated at two tables in the same car-claim that they were doing what other passengers were doing, ordering wine and enjoying the trip through California’s vineyards and wineries.

She went on to add, “I felt like it was a racist attack on us”. “I’m very traumatized by the picture they’ve painted of us”. This is “not a bar”, she told them.

But when the train pulled into St. Helena station, the women were marched off the train past six cars of other passengers and delivered into the hands of officers from the Napa Valley Railroad Police and the St. Helen Police Department.

Johnson acknowledged that the group of women may have been “rambunctious” – as a large group of friends presumably would be when on a bar-on-wheels in the countryside – but was not “obnoxious or intoxicated”.

“It was a freaky thing for all of us”, Johnson said, saying that the group tried to cooperate.

A message posted to the Wine Train’s Facebook account late Saturday afternoon, but later taken down, stated that “following verbal and physical abuse towards other guests and staff, it was necessary to get our police involved”.