Milwaukee Bucks big John Henson claims a Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, store, and the local police, racially profiled him on Monday.
“They locked the door and told me to go away,” Henson told his Instagram followers about attempting to enter the store during business hours. “After I rang the doorbell twice everyone went to the back. No [one] answered the door or told me what was going on.”
Henson says the police arrived, ran his dealer plates, and questioned him. The store says the lockdown followed a “safety protocol,” initiated whenever a young black man comes within 500 feet of their business because a car with dealer plates unconnected to that vehicle raised suspicions for the shop, an explanation that itself raised suspicions. The business, the target of numerous robberies, believed thieves cased the location on Friday.
Whitefish Bay, as its name suggests, serves as a local mecca for white people. Henson may have enjoyed a more pleasant shopping experience had his stardom come in ultimate frisbee, hacky sack, or soccer. Pale faces comprise more than 90 percent of the locals. African Americans? Less than two percent. Milwaukee Brewers manager Craig Counsell, Weatherman bombinatrix Bernardine Dohrn, 3rd Rock from the Sun‘s Kristen Johnson, and NFL referee Ed Hochuli rank as a few of the famous Caucasians hailing from Whitefish Bay.
Dohrn, perhaps anticipating the unpleasantness at Schwanke-Kasten Jewelers, denounced her “white privilege” long before Henson’s birth and Hochuli promotes racial unity through his ebony-and-ivory fall fashion statement broadcast to millions on Sundays. The town’s high school staged The Wiz as a display of its racial progressivity back in the early 1990s. And its denizens voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. If all that weren’t enough to establish the cloud-complected community’s bona fides as a bastion of racially-progressive whites, earlier this month Whitefish Bay’s United Methodist Church advertised a lecture by the author of Waking Up White on how her “own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color…actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race.”
All this work to dislodge the community from its mocking moniker of Whitefolks Bay seems undermined by Monday’s incident.
“This was one of the the most degrading and racially prejudice[d] things I’ve ever experienced in life and wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Henson explained. “This store needs to be called out and that’s what I’m doing. You have no right to profile someone because of their race and nationality and this incident needs to be brought to light and I urge anyone who ever is thinking of shopping here reads this and doesn’t bring any business to this discriminatory place.”
Henson certainly possesses the money to buy not just the jewelry but the store, too. He signed a four-year, $45 million deal a few weeks back.
Remember: “Never settle for ordinary when you are seeking fine jewelry for that special someone. Instead, insist on beauty, originality and elegance from Schwanke-Kasten Jewelers.” On second thought, maybe just order online to take advantage of their “free ground shipping” on orders of $75 or more in case impromptu closings and itchy 9-1-1 trigger fingers strike as inconvenient.
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