Happy Birthday! Have some racism from Elmwood Cafe!

[randomness]

Particularly for friends in the Bay Area.

"Scram!" eh?

Guess that's one place I won't be going to next time I'm in Berkeley.

http://wkamaubell.com/2015/01/happy-birthday-have-some-racism-from-elmwood-cafe/

Comments

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was stunningly shitty treatment for them to be giving anybody. And you have to wonder who ELSE they're yelling GIT at first and asking questions later, across all sorts of other -isms.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

Wow. Just wow.

I'm going to repost that page on my facebook page, to hopefully get the word out that in late January, 2015, racism is still rampant, even in a place that likes to claim they are openminded and liberal. Gah.

(I stopped reading the comments at the &*$% who claimed the waitperson was likely coming to a correct conclusion, that it really did seem like a "person selling something" and not racism. )

[merlinofchaos]

Even if the waitperson had come to the correct conclusion, that's now how you handle it.

This is:

Waitperson: "Excuse me [customer], but is this person bothering you?"

Customer: "No, he's my husband. Why would there be a problem?"

Waitperson: "Oh, I'm so sorry to have intruded, I thought he might be trying to sell you something. We get a lot of that in here, but I see I was mistaken! Have a great day!" *walks away*.

It's not really complicated.. If there's a problem you've gone the step of making sure your customers know you'll handle it. If there isn't a problem, your customers know that you'll treat them well.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

My mind constructs this unpleasant narrative: A man dressed like a street person walks up to the patrons sitting at the outside tables of a restaurant that serves $13 sloppy joes. A waiter suspects he is a panhandler and shoos him away.

There's a lot of racism in that, but also a lot of classism. I doubt a black man in a good suit and tie would have been shooed away. Racism is slowly fading in American, but classism shows no signs of declining, and I could argue that it's getting significantly worse. In the long run, Elmwood Cafe's patrons will probably reward it for keeping the riff-raff away.