A fuller Wine Train apology
Black book club member says the latest mea culpa doesn’t go far enough.
The Napa Valley Wine Train issued a fuller apology Tuesday to members of a book club made up largely of black women, saying that company employees were “100 percent wrong” to kick them off the train for supposedly being loud.
The apology came after a member of the club met with the wine train’s chief executive, Anthony Giaccio, late Monday and suggested cultural and diversity sensitivity training for its employees.
Giaccio said the company already has cultural sensitivity training but will offer additional diversity training for its employees. He also pledged to participate in the training.
“The Napa Valley Wine Train was 100 percent wrong in its handling of this issue,” Giaccio said in a statement. “We accept full responsibility for our failures and for the chain of events that led to this regrettable treatment of our guests.”
The business, he said, was insensitive to the women.
Public backlash against the company began after Lisa Renee Johnson, a member of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge Book Club, posted photographs and comments on Facebook describing the moment she and 10 other women were kicked off the train and told by employees that they were laughing too loudly.
According to Johnson’s account, the women boarded the train Saturday morning, and were sipping wine and eating cheese as they traveled. However, two hours later, train workers told the women that other passengers had complained about their noise level and that it had become a problem. The women were told leave.
At least one passenger scolded the women, saying, “This is not a bar,” according to Johnson’s Facebook page.
About 1 p. m., the women were met by police officers and given a bus ride back to the station.
The group was escorted through six train cars “on display in front of the other guests to waiting police like we were criminals,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson blamed racial bias, saying that the group was kicked off the train because most of them are African American. She said they were guilty of “laughing while black.”
Train officials refunded the women’s tickets and have since invited the women, their family and friends to fill a train car.
Johnson said Tuesday that the new apology doesn’t change the way her group feels about the incident.
“It’s not going to make us feel less humiliated,” she said, adding that the train officials should have acknowledged that the incident was an issue of race.
Johnson said the club doesn’t plan on taking the offer to ride the train again.
Such incidents occur about once a month, train spokesman Sam Singer said. Most of the passengers who are removed from the train, he said, are white.
When booking the trip, the women told wine train workers that they would be enjoying one another’s company and that “we may be loud,” he said.
From that point, he said, the workers should have taken measures to accommodate the women.