One woman’s story of racism in Redmond

We all have annoyances, stresses and challenge in life. Sometimes you can roll with them. Sometimes that’s not so easy. This is one woman’s story about an incident that happened on a Metro bus last year that she still can’t get over.

>>Listen to Valerie Pendelton’s story

Valerie Pendelton lives in Bellevue and rides the bus everywhere she needs to go. On August 6, 2010 she planned a trip to Redmond to drop off a down payment at a Tae Kwon Do school. She got on the bus and found a seat on the left.

“I thought this will be a piece of cake. This is out in the suburbs of Redmond. I kind of sat back that day and was listening to a CD,” she says.

As the bus moved along 520, a young woman behind Pendelton started swearing. That’s not too unusual, but it went on for several minutes and was loud enough to be heard through Pendelton’s headphones.

“The young lady that was saying these obscenities kept saying them,” Pendelton recalls. “My mind just raced. What’s happening? Who’s she talking to? Is a fight going to break out? My mind had a thousand and one questions.”

The biggest question, as the girl got louder and more disruptive, is the bus driver going to do anything about this?

“He poked his head around the safety partition that they have on the busses, and he said something to the effect of, ‘You need to quiet down or I’ll ask you to leave the bus.’ He turned right back around and continued driving, but then it only got worse from there,” she says.

Pendelton finally turned around said something to a woman who was with the girl. She assumed the older woman was a parent and suggested she keep her daughter under control.

That set the girl off.

“She pounded on the windows for a few minutes and that’s when she went into her tirade,” says Pendelton. “She called me the N-word several times. I would have to say six or seven times followed by the other derogatory term that referred to a woman’s reputation. If that wasn’t bad enough she followed that up with, ‘I will get my knife and I will kill you, with the N-word, and I will stab you.’ She kept telling me she was gonna stab me.

The driver stopped at the Overlake Transit Center and had everyone get off the bus. Redmond Police pulled up and listened to Pendelton’s complaint about the young woman’s racist threats.

They were familiar with the 22-year-old girl. Police told Pendelton they’ve had numerous run ins with her. She’s someone who has severe mood swings and was off her medication. They filed a six-page report, but didn’t take the threat literally like Pendelton did.

“It didn’t really hit me until that night when I got back home,” she says. “Just as soon as I walked into my apartment – I had a bag full of stuff – without hesitation or without thinking I took the bag and just threw it across my apartment as hard as I could. I was floored and I was angry.”

The Redmond prosecutor did not file charges in the case. A Redmond police officer did warn the girl “if she continued creating disturbances on buses she would be placed under arrest,” according to the police report.

Ten months after hearing those racial slurs and threats on the bus, Pendelton is still affected by this.

“In the grocery store or in the drug store, if there’s somebody in the same section where I want to go get a product, I’ll stand back and just watch them for a few minutes. Once they leave, I’ll go get the product,” she says. “Sometimes I’m even too afraid to say, ‘Excuse me,’ for fear that I’ll get called a racial slur.”

You might be thinking – get over it. Why does this bother her so much?

That wasn’t the first time Pendelton heard the N-word. As a 49-year-old black woman, she has encountered racism in other cities. But she says racism in the Seattle area is “different.”

“It’s,” she pauses to choose her words. “It’s a certain amount of bigotry that I’ve never experienced anywhere else, not even in California.”

Pendelton realizes her story is a small one. She’s probably not going to get any resolution on this case. Maybe all she can do is get people thinking about racist attitudes that still exist. Especially here.

“It’s something that’s quietly swept under the rug. It makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable,” she says. “From my point of view it seems to be almost accepted. I don’t feel like I have any civil rights.”

Is racism in the Northwest “quietly swept under the rug” and does it make us “feel uncomfortable” to talk about?

If you’ve lived in other parts of the country, do you agree with Pendelton that racism in the Seattle area is “different” and if so, how?