Man allegedly kicked off Greyhound bus because of his Muslim name
Mohammad Reza, a Ph.D. candidate, says that he was kicked off a Greyhound bus at three in the morning at a stop in Wichita, Kansas for no other reason than his name is Muslim.
Reza specializes in urban planning and transportation engineering at the University of Texas and won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The driver lady came to me and woke me up and asked for my ticket. I showed her my ticket on my phone. Seeing my name on the ticket, which is ‘Mohammad,’ she told me ‘Your ticket is not acceptable and since you don’t have a printed version of it, you have to leave the bus,’” wrote Reza on Facebook along with a video of his disagreement with the driver.
He said that he got out his ticket and showed it to the driver. “Again she asked me to leave the bus. I asked for the reason and she responded ‘I don’t want to talk to you!’
“You’re not going with me. I don’t want to talk to you no more. You get off my bus. Police is helping you out. Don’t worry, police is coming. You’re not going with me,” the driver is heard saying in the video.
“You’re not going with me! So stop talking to me,” the driver says as Reza holds his ticket, “What’s the reason?”
Greyhound told the news media that the behavior of the driver was unacceptable.
“Greyhound does not tolerate discrimination of any kind and is taking these allegations very seriously. We’ve identified the driver and are currently conducting a thorough investigation into the matter,” they said.
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Reza posted that the driver called the police when he said he would not get off the bus until she gave him a reason for kicking him off of it. He says that the only possible reason is that he has a Muslim name and he is an Iranian-American international student.
Discrimination against Muslim Americans has intensified in the last two years. Hate crimes against Muslims went up 20 percent between 2015 and 2016 according to FBI statistics. In 2015 hate crimes against Muslims were up almost 70 percent compared to the year before.
When police arrived at the scene they took the side of the bus driver and told him that due to the fact that it’s private property, the driver has the right to refuse him service.
He was 200 miles away from his destination and it was the middle of the night. He had to hire a Lyft driver to take him the rest of the way to a conference he was going to attend which cost him almost $250.
On his way home, instead of using the bus ticket he had purchased, he took a flight.
“I stayed calm and courteous throughout the ordeal,” he said, asking that people share his story “to prevent these attitudes in future.”
