Photo by [F]oxymoronSo, a little while back, a DCist editor may or may not have—but totally did—compare this website’s comment threads to a very unsanitary place. But comparatively, perhaps DCist commenters aren’t so bad.
BuzzFeed yesterday caught wind of the comments on a Washington Examiner story about a study of race relations at U.S. restaurants finding that about 4 percent of black restaurant patrons experience some form of racism from waitstaff.
OK, maybe the Examiner’s Paul Bedard was baiting the hook a little when he attempted to tie the restaurant study to the outrage over the February 26 shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch patrolman George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla.
The heated and ever-expanding national rage over racism is now spilling into the America’s large chain restaurants where African-Americans say everything from their tipping to tableside etiquette is dissed by white waitstaff, according to an in-depth survey for the Journal of Black Studies provided to Secrets.
But what follows in the comments below is just horrible. Broad assumptions that blacks are bad tippers and rude patrons are rampant, along with insinuations of genetic inferiority. Here’s one of the less awful but still pretty bad comments:
I delivered pizzas to help get my way through college. Delivering to blacks always sucked because they would always stiff me. They also complained more than anyone. The best tippers were the poor whites in the trailer parks. The rich whites would usually give 10 or 15 percent, but the less well off whites would often give me a $5 tip.
It gets way worse from there. DCist commenters, I think we’ve found the real urinal.
