Amazon.com’s Whole Foods Market doesn’t want to be forced to let workers wear “Black Lives Matter” masks and is pointing to the recent US Supreme Court ruling permitting a business owner to refuse services to same-sex couples to get federal regulators to back off.
National Labor Relations Board prosecutors have accused the grocer of stifling worker rights by banning staff from wearing BLM masks or pins on the job. The company countered in a filing that its own rights are being violated if it’s forced to allow BLM slogans to be worn with Whole Foods uniforms.
Amazon is the most prominent company to use the high court’s June ruling that a Christian web designer was free to refuse to design sites for gay weddings, saying the case “provides a clear roadmap” to throw out the NLRB’s complaint.
The dispute is one of several in which labor board officials are considering what counts as legally-protected, work-related communication and activism on the job.
It’s not about refusing to adopt a “race ideology” that suggests racism; it’s the refusal to acknowledge statistical evidence, the refusal to investigate the law and history of this country, the refusal to recognize cause and effect, and the refusal to appreciate that some times, empathy simply is not possible. It’s the refusal to recognize that history has an impact on the present, and to make the future better than the present, we must make the present better than the past. What suggests racism is being presented with all of that information, and take a stand against making things better.