Author Natasha Tynes publicly shamed a black, female transit worker and now she has lost a book deal.
Tynes is a Jordanian-American who identifies as a “minority writer.” While commuting on a train in Washington DC Friday, she saw a Metro bus operator eating her breakfast, which violates the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) rules forbidding any kind of eating, smoking, or drinking in vehicles or train stations.
Just to be clear, like Tynes, the woman eating breakfast was a train passenger who just happens to be employed by the Transit Authority. She was in uniform because she was on her way to work. Don’t confuse her, as some have, with a train employee eating while she was supposed to be doing her job on the train.
Anyway, according to Tynes, after she took it upon herself to confront the woman about breaking the rules, the bus driver responded with a curt, “Worry about yourself,” that ended up being a pretty good piece of advice.
Unwilling to heed that advice, Tynes decided to photograph the woman, tweet out her photo, and publicly demand action from the WMATA.
“When you’re on your morning commute & see @wmata employee in UNIFORM eating on the train. I thought we were not allowed to eat on the train. This is unacceptable. Hope @wmata responds,” she tweeted with the woman’s photo.
“When I asked the employee about this, her response was ‘worry about yourself,’” Tynes added.
Within an hour, transit officials tweeted back a thank you for “catching” their employee and asked for help in order to “make sure all Metro employees are held accountable.” Tynes provided the WMATA with more information and thanked them for responding.
All hell then broke loose against Tynes as an intersectional demolition derby for the ages hit Defcon 1. All of a sudden this female “minority writer” was relentlessly attacked on Twitter as a racist.
“Again, @NatashaTynes, you went over, above, beyond and out of your way to cause trouble for a black woman who was not bothering you,” read one tweet.
“Horrible Person Natasha Tynes Wanted Attention & Praise for Trying to Get Woman Fired For The Crime of Eating While Black,” read another.
“So @NatashaTynes decided to use her power as a NBPOC [non-black person of color — I had to look it up] to get a Black Women fired for eating on a train in uniform. When I tell Black Women we are ALL we got – this is the shit I’m talking about.”
And on and on and on it went… Countless tweets in this same vein attacked Tynes, almost all with the same message about this being a race issue.
One blue checkmark explained it this way: “Just learned what Natasha Tynes -who is Jordanian-American- did. Anti-Black racism is shamefully all too common among non-Black people of colour. I would add classism to the list of bigotries that we must fight too.”
Tynes’ world then caved in when her book deal was abruptly canceled.
Rare Birds Books, the distributor of Tynes’ upcoming dystopian novel set for release in just three weeks — They Called Me Wyatt — pulled the plug:
Rare Bird is aware than an author distributed by us, Natashe Tynes, did something awful today. … Black women face a constant barrage of this kind of inappropriate behavior directed toward them and a constant policing of their bodies. We think this is unacceptable and have no desire to be involved with anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to jeopardize a person’s safety and employment in this way…. [We] are strongly urging Tynes’ publisher California Coldblood to consider other appropriate actions.
The publisher, California Coldblood followed up announcing the June 11 publish date was off and the company intended to “discuss appropriate next steps to officially cancel it.”
Tynes eventually released a tweet apologizing for what she did.
Then she set her Twitter account to private.
Then she deleted her entire Twitter account and website.
The apology was not accepted.
A perfect example is journalist Yashar Ali’s tweetstorm demanding a pound of Tynes’ flesh:
Natasha, what you did was so horrible you need to explain why you did it in paragraphs/pages. Not bullet points and certainly not a tweet. There are few graver sins in my mind than targeting someone who works in a job like that woman does.
[Y]ou used your platform to try and get someone fired for eating. For eating! And you apologize with a single tweet? You used up 93 characters and you had 280. We’ll be requiring a lengthy medium post thank you very much.
I think we can all agree that what Tynes did was awful. Apparently this bus driver only had a few minutes to eat while changing routes and took advantage of her downtime on the train. Yes, this violated the rules, but it had no impact on Tynes.
Had Tynes ratted the woman out privately, that would have been bad enough, but to tweet a photograph of her… Man alive.
No one despises self-righteous tattletales and snitches more than I, but…
Does she deserve to have her whole life destroyed, her entire writing career?
Of course not, and what you have here is everything awful about social justice Twitter in one story.
- An unforgiving Tynes publicly puffs herself up by humiliating a woman for breaking a rule.
- Twitter’s unforgiving social justice warriors, without a hint of evidence, accuse Tynes of racism.
- An unforgiving book publisher caves to the mob, cancels Tynes’ novel, something she probably spent years on, something she probably saw as a lifelong dream come true.
- Tynes apologizes.
- Like something out of Orwell’s 1984, the unforgiving Yashar Ali and company demand she write a gajillion word apology but give no indication even that will be good enough.
Listen, it’s good Tynes was called out for her terrible behavior.
But it’s terrible she was accused of being a racist, terrible she lost her novel, and terrible no one will graciously accept her apology and move on.
What’s really going on here, though, is this…
The real reason a Jordanian-American woman was accused of being a racist is because America’s hideous social justice warriors are all pro-snitch, all pro tattletale, all pro rat. Their entire M.O. is to report people to the authorities for the latest ThoughtCrime. That meant they had to find a hook to defend this poor bus driver that was based on something other than what would have been a hypocritical attack against snitching — so the racism charge was not only fabricated out of whole cloth, look at how quickly everyone got on the same page, including the publisher.
Except for this bus driver, who is guilty of nothing more than working so hard she was put in a position where she had to break a rule in order to grab a bite to eat, everyone is this story is not only awful, they are all the same — self-righteous and unforgiving parasites whose sustenance comes from destroying the lives of others.
If we could just stop snitching on one another, if we could just start accepting apologies and offering second chances, this world would instantly become a much better place.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.