Most people know who Danny Glover is. The TV and film star was in the "Lethal Weapon" movies and in 1999, he filed a complaint against the City Taxi and Limousine Commission about discrimination.
The problem with black men and taxi cabs has also been explored in the tap-musical "Bring in 'da, Noise Bring in 'da Funk" with another Glover. Savion. In Danny Glover's case, five yellow taxi cabs passed him by while he, his college student daughter and her roommate tried to wave them down in New York. Glover was born and lived in San Francisco at the time.
There is more than black and white to the cab situation. As we made our way to the airport in a cab, our cab driver, an Armenian man with a heavy accent, told us how black women had tried to cheat him. The man had been a cab driver for over two decades and had most recently driven director Woody Allen and his former stepdaughter now wife Soon Yi Previn Allen.
The cab driver mentioned that he didn't want to be racist, but in his experience, it had always been black people, particularly women, who tried to cheat him or bully him out of his hard-earned dollars. In one instance, the woman caught the cab and then claimed she just needed to go inside the house to fetch the cash. When the woman did not return, he went knocking on the door. She threatened to call the cops. He told her to go right ahead.
In the second instance, he related how he had been waiting for a long time at a casino when a black woman came and told him he owed her money. He owed her change and she threatened to call the police. The police did come and he calmly told them to check his hood or his engine. If the woman's claim had been true, his hood and engine would be hot. However, since he had been parked and no record could be found through his dispatcher, his hood was cool.
So while we left Los Angeles feeling sorry for cab drivers, the cab drivers in Buenos Aires left us feeling hostile. In our small group, we often took taxis. One would go with the two German-speaking Swiss women. The other with us, two East Asian ethnics. In all cases, except once, the cab driver we took charged us more--even when we were with the Spanish-speaking guide. We would leave first and arrive last. In one particularly offensive case, our cab left first, but he kept surging ahead and then getting behind the cab carrying the other two people. He could hardly be lost because we were going to a very central ara. He stopped at the traffic light to talk with the other cab driver then went back to his zigzagging, meandering strategy.
There was another cab ride when my heart just dropped because I knew we were being taken off the route on side roads, but with the language barrier it was hard to express my doubt. Further, the German-speaking white women weren't having the same problem--with or without the Spanish-speaking guide.
The last cab we took, we looked up the route on Google maps and checked the mileage of the alternative routes and gave instructions by the shortest route. I spoke to the cab driver in Spanish and spoke to my husband in Japanese, a language I was pretty sure most cab drivers wouldn't understand.
As a result, I have no sympathy for the cab drivers of Buenos Aires. I know that the same thing could easily happen to me in New York, but over the span of ten days to have only one cab driver be honest and give us a good fare, one that was better than the cab with the women, is highly suspicious.
In Los Angeles, I know the roads and how much it should cost to get to LAX so it's hard to know if that sort of racism exists here. I'd warn all East Asian Americans and East Asians to be wary of cab drivers in Buenos Aires--more so than white people. In many cases if it's relatively safe, I'd rather walk.
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