It turns out that the comedy TV series Portlandia may be a documentary. KOMO-TV, a Seattle station, reports on the latest manifestation of absurdity emanating from a city so absurd that it generated its own parody television series:

Two employees of a bakery in Northeast Portland were fired earlier this month for denying a black woman service because the business had closed.

"Back To Eden Bakery" released several public apologies and statements following the incident, before letting the employees go. In one Facebook post, the bakery's co-owner wrote, "We are doing business in a gentrified neighborhood in a racist city within a racist state of a racist country.”

In one statement, "Back To Eden Bakery" says that according to its own surveillance video, a black woman named "Lillian", who is well known in the area as a "professional equity activist", entered at 9:06 p.m., after the bakery's closing time. Employees had also turned off the "Open" sign, but several customers (all white) who had already ordered were still inside. Two other white women who went to the bakery two minutes before "Lillian", and were also informed that the business was closed for the night.

Back to Eden (image via Google Maps)

In my opinion, there is an inescapable presumption behind this firing: ordinary rules do not apply to black people. Failure to realize that any demand from a black person must be immediately complied with, no matter the rules that apply to all other people, is a firing offense, it looks like to me.

It is more than a little surprising to see a business labelling its neighbors and presumably customers “racists,” but who knows? Maybe in Portlandia, people prefer to give their business to those who abuse them as the worst thing a person can be these days, a racist. Sort of a sado-masochistic approach to baked goods?

It gets worse:

The bakery's statement says that even though it does not consider the employees to be racist and that they were following the business's protocol of closing at 9 p.m., they were fired because "sometimes impact outweighs intent." The bakery also says in the statement that the way the employees went about denying the woman service, "lacked sensitivity and understanding of the racial implications at work."

In the statement "Back To Eden" says the employees were fired because the woman and the "clamoring public" demanded they be fired.

In one statement, the bakery admitted that the employees did not necessarily do anything wrong, "this is more about how a black woman was made to feel" at the business.

That statements [sic] have since been deleted.

David Bernstein at Instapundit updates the use of the memory hole:

The bakery owners seem to have modified their story a bit in a new Facebook post. They now claim that the fired workers served the two white women who came in slightly earlier, but only if they took their order “to go,” and that one employee was probationary, and the other had been warned about poor customer service in the past. That would make a certain amount of sense, and yet it doesn’t explain why the owners decided to scrub their earlier posts on the subject.

Maybe all those racists in Portland will continue to support this bakery. But if they are racists, and it is not, why should they?