sometimes it's important to remind ourselves..

A recent news item making it’s rounds in the blogs, describes the experience of a well known Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, being kicked out of Hotel Vitale, in the SF bay area. It just highlights how very different peoples’ realities are based solely on skin color – yes, even today. Ngugi was here to promote his most recent book. Here’s a post that made it around in the blogs, describing Ngugi’s experience:

“…What happened next could have been a scene from a pre-Civil Rights Era of a Black man caught in a “White Only” section of a hotel. A hotel employee approached the Professor and said:
“This place is for guests of the hotel. You have to leave.”
Handling the matter calmly and intrigued by the assertion of the man, the Professor asked
“How do you know that I am not a guest of the hotel?” ..”

Here's an interesting article on that.

Here’s another post that also prints the CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality response, which begins “Prejudice still exists in America. It is real and palpable…”



And finally, here’s one of the comments from a staff member at the hotel, which reveals the distance we need to travel to clarify the insidiousness of bias to people that consider themselves rational, logical, and only ‘doing their job’.