This story first appeared in The American Bazaar
The Sound Credit Union’s staff tells Jamela Mohamed to remove her headgear while they attended other clients with their caps on.
Staff at the Sound Credit Union in Kent, Washington, apparently, asked a Muslim American woman to remove her headgear before taking service. Jamela Mohamed, the alleged victim, wrote on her Facebook account on May 6 that she is Muslim woman and was observing Jummah the previous day – Muslims observe Friday for prayers and, mostly, Muslim women keep their heads covered.
Mohamed wrote that she had gone to pay her bill, as in any other day. However, that day being a Friday, she had her head covered. When the staff objected, she went back to her car to grab a hijab (a headgear and article of faith for Muslim women). To her surprise, when she returned, she noticed that while she was refused service because of her headgear, two other people, who were wearing caps, were being attended without objection.
“The teller asks me to “take off my hood”. In order to adhere to their policy, I ran outside to get my hijab. When I came back, two men before me were served with no issues, but both were wearing hats,” Mohamed wrote on Facebook.
Member of the South Credit Union, Mohamed pulled out her phone camera and started recording the incident on the spot. The video shows that a woman staff member asks Mohamed to stop filming and leave the place at the count of three, or else she would call the 911.
Eventually, Mohammed was escorted out of the premises. In the video, Mohamed is seen crying and complaining that she was “completely embarrassed” and that “the lady [staffer] literally followed” her out. “I never want this to happen to anybody and NOBODY should ever be treated this way,” she said.
The one-minute-34-second video, which looks edited in a couple of places, was viewed more than 870,000 times on Facebook; Nearly 8,500 people shared it online.
In response, Sound Credit Union apologized for the incident on Facebook. The Bank’s authorities tweeted on May 9, “We have been reviewing a video that was posted to social media that documents an interaction that occurred at the Kent Branch recently. As a credit union, we believe in equal treatment for all.”
As a credit union, we believe in equal treatment for all.
See the latest update here: https://t.co/C5Mg4NHpea pic.twitter.com/cqcVmlW2To— Sound Credit Union (@sound_cu) May 8, 2017
You can watch the video here.
Watch: Muslim American woman complains of discrimination in Kent, Washington