In San Antonio last week, a charter school fired an art teacher who refused to stop wearing Black Lives Matter masks to her classroom. Five cars responded to the Whataburger, and Congious left and did not return to work. At the news conference on Wednesday, she called on Whataburger to provide additional implicit bias training and institute a companywide holiday to celebrate Juneteenth next year, and urged its CEO, Ed Nelson, to publicly state that “Black Lives Matter to Whataburger." Caught in the middle of an increasingly polarized discussion on politics and race, Smith argued, employers must affirm Black employees and customers who want their humanity recognized rather than bending over backward to accommodate White customers. If not, he said, Congious’s incident “sends a message that Whataburger really doesn’t care about the Black people who work for them or buy their hamburgers.”

Source: Washington Post September 24, 2020 10:18 UTC