A NYU sophomore contacted university officials after a dining hall cook brushed off her complaints about the school’s special Black History Month meal of barbecue ribs, corn bread, collard greens, and more. The New York Times reports that College of Arts & Science student Nia Harris questioned the head cook at Weinstein Passport Dining Hall after the meal, also consisting of Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water, was served earlier this week.
Responding to Harris, the cook insisted that the Kool-Aid was actually fruit punch (Harris said it definitely wasn’t) and that food services always served fruit-flavored water. Harris pointed out in her message to school officials that the options of fruit-flavored water never included watermelon on other days. The cook also told her that the members of the dining staff who planned the meal were black.
In an email that she shared on Facebook, Harris wrote that the cook was “clearly diverting the blame from himself as to put it onto black people to assure me that it was not racially insensitive because black people thought of it.”
University president Andrew Hamilton addressed the complaint on Wednesday in an official statement, saying, “We were shocked to learn of the drink and food choices that our food service provider – Aramark – offered at the Weinstein dining hall as part of Black History Month. It was inexcusably insensitive. That error was compounded by the insensitivity of the replies made to a student who asked Aramark staff on site how the choices were made.”
The school’s food service provider suspended the director of the dining hall and revealed that the two workers who wrongly planned the menu independently were fired. The themed menu was comprised without consulting school officials’ opinions, and Hamilton announced that Aramark will begin working with “the existing student advisory bod and campus cultural groups” to plan future special menus.
Speaking to the Times, Harris said of the changes, “I would consider today a victory. But it’s also very important that we had to publicize it in order to put the pressure on them to do the right thing, because I feel like had I not publicized it, this could have gone a little bit differently…The burden of teaching people how to be respectful to [black people] is falling on us.”