It was senior year and I was working my first job. I worked in a popular restaurant chain near the Delaware border as a hostess.
I was nervous, and did not know what to expect. Having grown up in a very privileged community, I was taken by surprise at the amount of racial bias in the workforce, especially the food service industry.
It all started one fateful day when my coworker and I were seating tables.
I called the name of the next couple in line to be seated. My coworker watched as a young black couple stood up when I called them. I grabbed their menus, ready to seat them.
“Wait.” She interrupted me, taking the menus from me. “That’s her section.”
She pointed to a server who had been working in the restaurant for quite some time. I looked at my coworker in pure confusion as she told the black couple to wait while she sat a white couple in the server’s section.
She turned to me and said, “She doesn’t want black people in her section. They tip low.”
I felt my face turn hot with anger and embarrassment. She couldn’t be serious, could she? It was 2019! I had never seen anything like this happen before.
Unfortunately, this was just the start of a series of racist incidents I saw happen in the workplace. While I worked there, I saw white servers yell at and ignore black customers. I heard white coworkers make racist remarks against black coworkers, and I saw white customers refuse to tip my black coworkers when they gave perfectly good service.
I was in shock. For the first time in my life, I was in the real world, and I saw how ugly and deeply embedded racism was in America. Myself and several of my other coworkers reported each of the incidents after they happened, but many times nothing was done.
Eventually, reports made their way to corporate, and those behind the racist incidents were fired.
I learned that if there is any kind of bias in the workplace, it is essential to report it. Had we given up, the racism would have continued.
Allowing racism to continue in workplace environments sends a message of acceptability — and that is not OK.
As we’ve seen this year, racism is alive and active in America. In such a divided country, people have become more and more comfortable in their racist thoughts and actions.
Will racism ever escape this world? There’s no telling of that, but we must do our part in correcting this wrong as much as we can. People learn what they are taught, so we have a duty to teach them by whatever means possible. If this means filing a report to corporate when a racist incident occurs, then we should do that.
If there is going to be change in America, we need to start by ending discrimination in the workplace.