Chipotle has suspended their store manager of the South Carolina store after Darius Leonard says he was racially profiled and kicked out of the restaurant, after having a private conversation with his family about the Black Lives Matter movement.
What We Know:
- Leonard, 24, is approaching his third season with the Colts as an All-Pro linebacker. Leonard posted Thursday to Instagram about the situation, with the caption “This is what being BLACK in America is“.
- A white customer told the store manager that Leonard and his family were verbally abusing him and talking trash to him, all a lie. After getting kicked out, the white customer laughed as they were leaving.
- In his Instagram posts, he explained that this situation is a prime example of how it is to be Black in America.
- Leonard didn’t specifically identify who he was eating with, but referred to them as “family” and described them as “three other Black guys and a mixed woman”.
- Chipotle is now investigating Leonard’s claim and the store manager has since been suspended. Chairman and CEO Brian Niccol reached out to Leonard personally.
“We are currently investigating the incident involving Darius Leonard in Florence, South Carolina,” Niccol wrote in a statement. “We have a zero tolerance policy for discrimination of any kind and we have suspended our manager while we conduct a thorough investigation. I’m committed to ensuring the appropriate action is taken once the investigation concludes.”
- Leonard expressed in his post:
“And, we felt like he was very disrespectful and that’s the white privilege that we are talking about. There’s no Black guy that can sit there and eat peacefully without being racially profiled. We know that if that manager would have called the cops right then and there, we know what would have went down.”
He went on to talk about the death of George Floyd and what the black community goes through daily. Black people just want to be treated equally, he expressed.
