Racial Discrimination Still Exists, at Least in Restaurants

Imagine yourself in December of 1955 as Rosa Parks and you are being arrested by the police for refusing to give up your seat to a white man and move to the back of a city bus just because you are black. Think of all the struggles the Black Americans went through over the years in fighting racism and discrimination. The protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. and his popular “I have a dream” speech where he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character...” If you take a look at those periods and the present and the current situation, you may be inclined to think that racial discrimination is a thing of the past and maybe support the notion with the fact that the US now has an African-American president, but research has shown that racial discrimination still exists, at least in restaurants.

A new study from North Carolina State University shows that more than one-third of restaurant servers discriminate against African-American customers. A third of the servers that participated in the research admitted to varying their quality of service based on customers’ race, often giving African-Americans inferior service. 200 servers working at 18 full-service chain restaurants in central North Carolina were surveyed and majority of them – approximately 86 percent – were white.

The survey results showed that 38.5 percent of servers reported that customers’ race informed their level of service at least some of the time, often resulting in providing inferior service to African-American customers. The findings show that many servers perceive African-American customers to be impolite and/or poor tippers, suggesting that black patrons, in particular, are likely targets of servers’ self-professed discriminatory actions. The survey also found that 52.8 percent of servers reported seeing other servers discriminate against African-American customers by giving them poor service at least some of the time.

Race continues to be an issue in society and is also a significant barrier to equal treatment in restaurants and other areas of social life.