|
Long ago I was taught that the true test of someone’s character is what a person does when no one is watching. I was reminded of this last week when a Tweet surfaced showing a Lehigh Valley PA Lyft driver, James Bode, interact with two customers at a late night pick-up. The interaction was recorded by an inward-facing dashboard camera.
As this NBC10 story relates, Bode arrived at a bar named Fossil’s Last Stand, where he was set to pick up a woman (who happened to be the owner of the bar) and a man. When the woman entered Bode’s vehicle, she said, “You’re like a white guy.” Bode responded with, “What’s that?”
As the woman made her way to the middle of the back seat, she answered, “Are you, like a white guy? You’re like, a normal guy? You speak English?” She must have sensed that Bode was uncomfortable because she gave a quick laugh and patted Bode’s shoulder and apologized.
In fact, Bode (who appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties) is white-color. At the time he was wearing a backwards baseball cap and sporting a beard.
It was then that Bode said to the woman that her comments were completely inappropriate, and he told the woman to get out of his car. He said, “If somebody was not white, sitting in this seat, what would be the difference?”
Bode also told the man (who was still standing outside the car) that he wouldn’t accept the fare. The man responded, “Really? You’re a f+++g a++hole.” The man then threatened to punch Bode in the face.
Bode responded by calling the couple “racist f++ks.”
The man then called Bode a “(n-word) lover.”
As a consequence of the incident, Bode contacted the local police department and filed a report. He also posted on Facebook this statement:
“But this is the way it should be everywhere, every time. I shouldn’t be ‘the guy’ who did it or said it…we should all be that person. Speak up if you’re uncomfortable with it because it makes them uncomfortable, as they should be. F**k racism.”
The story doesn’t end there. As Bode’s video racked up more than 3 million views, Yelp and TripAdvisor were flooded with negative reviews and one-star ratings of Fossil’s Last Stand. Additionally, others have shared Bode’s Lyft handle (@Jameswb333) to provide him with tips. Others discovered that Bode’s father died last year and have contributed to a preexisting GoFundMe to cover funeral expenses.
Given where we are as a country—including how a white man murdered black people at a Buffalo grocery store the same weekend as Bode’s interaction with that couple—the story of James Bode speaking up provides us with much-needed hope. As Jenice Armstrong wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer after Bode’s story went viral, “What we need right now are more people like Bode, who are willing to confront the cancer of bigotry that’s been rotting this nation from the inside out since its inception by our slave-owning, misogynistic Founding Fathers.
Armstrong continued, “We can’t count on our institutions to do it for us. For the most part, they’ve failed us…We, the American people, need to take it upon ourselves to push back against racism. It’s not enough for us as individuals to simply raise our hands and say we are not racist.”
Amen.
| 
