I found that strange too, but in link provided by @cowens’s we see that
Oates was using a four-day guest pass and his friend is a member at the gym.
The friend, who is not named, said in one video that the since-fired manager told him it was terminating his membership. He adds that he has been a paid member of L.A. Fitness for eight years and has had “multiple problems” with workers there.
So still a long-simmering thing, but only recently with Mr. Oates.
But why not both? I am sure I am not the only one who can hold cognitive dissonance at bay long enough to hold two ideas in my head at once:
No matter what might have ticked this manager off he acted in a racially insensitive way, and was inept enough at customer service that he deserved to be fired. He deserves scorn for his racism.
There could very well be something outside of the video besides race that nudged him over the edge into crazy mode. The member admitted that there were lots of incidents in the past so it is fully rational to not take the video as the be all and end all of what started this.
He can both act racist and be triggered by something unrelated to race. I would posit that most incidents of racism are triggered by something other than race. This doesn’t give anyone an out or excuse but it does help us all to get along.
Racism is treating people differently because of how they look. Whatever it’s a reaction to is immaterial to the reaction because racial prejudice is never the just way to react to anything, ever, and when someone does it, the thing they’re really reacting to is how someone looks. Everything else is irrelevant. When a black man is beat by cops for jaywalking where a white man jaywalks with impunity, jaywalking has nothing to do with it.
Thank you, because I can’t with this…
When people talk about “systemic racism”, this and the Starbucks incident are pretty much poster boys. It is simply assumed that if a black person, especially a black man, is engaging in a perfectly normal middle class or upper middle class activity, he must be cheating the system somehow.
One of the most cultured, casually-intelligent people I have ever known was a black guy. The crap he put up with…not every day, but frequently…would have given a saint reason to give in to rage or despair. It was just added stress in his life…one more thing he had to deal with that I didn’t.
Because it makes people wonder about your motives and your sanity?
But what’s the POINT?
Is the world REWARDING you for both condemning and excusing racism in the same breath?
The manager is a person of colour too, right? Seems to complicate things a bit.
If that’s the case then they need to state the reason.
… please share your thoughts on why you feel that complicates it.
My knee-jerk reaction to your comment is to assume that you feel they should be together in solidarity since they are both persons of color. But there’s a good chance that’s not what you meant, so I’m trying to reign in my stupidity before it gets me in trouble.
I finally watched the video. I’m impressed by how bored the cops looked. And I’m glad the situation didn’t escalate. It probably helped keep things calm that he was filming everything, and I’m pleased the cops backed his right to be filming. You don’t hear about that happening very often.
Can I definitively say – for myself – that everything in the video encapsulates everything that is going on? No, I don’t feel that I can. It does a good job of showing the surface of the situation. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But where there’s smoke, there’s also confusion. I just don’t know. I’m just thankful that nobody ended up shot this time.
I hope we get a followup story at some point.
This is exactly right. Also explains a lot of how poor white folks can be convinced to vote against their interests. So long as they are presented with a person saying in whatever way “you are better than (black, gay, Muslim, Catholic, female, etc.) and if you vote for the liberals they will take that away and you won’t be better than anybody,” they will vote that way to maintain that feeling of “at least I am not the lowest man on the totem pole.” Sad, but it is human nature to some extent.
This is a variation on the “if you would only comply you would not get shot” in that the fact that you got shot in and of itself proves that you must have done something to deserve it. Of course, being a POC is a given in that situation.
A nurse practitioner who worked in my office is a white woman married to a (very large) black man. She told me that they have been pulled over on several occasions only to have the officer lean around her husband to ask her if she is OK. I told her I would have been outraged in that situation. She said they could not afford to be outraged, because it could lead to him getting arrested or shot. I stopped being outraged and was just sad at that point. How do you fix a mess like that when the message we are getting from DC is that this is the proper and just attitude? 
Because I don’t want to go through the rest of my life being a disgusted pessimist. Because if this isn’t racially motivated then the world is a tiny bit better than I think it is. Because if this were in front of a judge and I were in the jury it would be my moral and civic duty to reserve judgement until all the facts had been presented. Because I don’t want to give assholes like Sean Hannity something to crow about if it turns out race wasn’t the issue.
So far all we have as evidence is some short video clips and one side of the story. For the record my gut feeling is that this IS racially motivated, but I’m trying to keep my confirmation bias in check here, which is difficult given the constant parade of racism on display in America.
Yelp reviews of this gym from the last few days all scream “racism”, but prior to this incident there don’t seem to be any complaints of racism ( I only scanned quickly through the several pages of reviews), however a lot of members, black and white (if we can believe their profiles, or anything we read on Yelp), complain about the management being pushy and rude. The Google reviews I scanned through all say the same thing, “staff is unprofessional and unpleasant”, again from (what appear to be) people of all races. Racism is the unavoidable undercurrent of America, so I can’t deny there is racism in the mix, but the employees could just be “equal-opportunity assholes.”
No, I just meant it complicates the idea that this is a basic story of white prejudice against a black man. It still might be that, but it’s going to be more, as I say, complicated.
PS Sorry, missed Shuck’s earlier comment and responses.
Frankly, they should offer the member a bonus year and the OTHER guy six-months free just for being harassed. But then, LA Fitness has always been a weird place based on all the other news about how to pump up profits.
Another case of racism which has yet to result in much outrage.
How is that not racism?
Gyms like LA Fitness are, in general, cess-pools of communicable diseases like foot fungus, staphylococcus, gonorrhea and/or hepatitis. Machines are rarely sanitized, and poorly done when they are. Shower facilities are even worse. If you read the contract you sign when you join, you’ll find a limited liability clause that prevents the gym from being held responsible for any-and-all diseases you may contract from their facilities. No thanks!
It is; semicolons are important.
Because for every incident that blows up and becomes news, there are thousands that don’t. This type of thing isn’t the exception.
