Barnes And Noble Issues Lame Excuse For Racist Store Display

TheDefendersOnline.com:

“Sometimes things aren’t always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden . . .” so said Phaedrus, a first century Roman slave and writer of Greek tales.

In recent days, a photograph of a Barnes and Noble book display honoring the inauguration of President Barack Obama has gone viral over the Internet because it prominently includes a book about monkeys with the other titles. The circulation of this photo with calls to boycott the book chain comes in the wake of protests and editorials over a racist cartoon published by The New York Post that featured President Obama as an ape being gunned down by police officers.

But hold on to your wigs and britches folks. Before the NAACP, Rev. Al Sharpton and other concerned citizens pick up signs and start making demands to fire managers and employees or telling consumers to stop buying books from Barnes and Noble, there is another side to the story.

Yes the photo is authentic. And yes the incident did happen at the Coral Gables, Florida store. But it turns out that it was a cruel joke by a customer and not a decision made by the store.

“This was not a company driven decision,” Edgar Chang, the store manager, said in an interview with TheDefendersOnline. “We are not sure how the book got in the window, but we believe it was put there by a customer who didn’t like the fact that Obama won the election.”

I'm not buying this apology. How does a customer get the time to place a book in a store window? Much less, how does the monkey book stay there long enough for people walking on the street to take photos? This sounds like the work of a bigot store employee. This Barnes & Noble store needs to conduct a thorough investigation of its workers, because so far their excuse sounds pretty lame.