Anti-Blackness at a Restaurant

Eating out while Black redux

Hello friends,

Sometimes it seems like I have to write about the same things over and over and over again.

Maybe that’s because we haven’t solved them yet.

A case in point … a trip to a restaurant on my recent trip to England.

To set the scene, we had made an admittedly late booking via an Indian restaurant’s online reservations tool. It had accepted our booking and we got a confirmation. But when we turned up and my daughter, who’d made the booking, presented that information, the restaurant owner balked. He said:

1. the restaurant was fully booked

2. the platform should never have accepted the reservation

3. there was no possibility of finding space for us (we thought differently, but our opinion didn’t count)

The interesting thing, if you could call it that, is that the composition of our group (three white people and two Black people) made no difference - once he saw who’d made the reservation, he’d made up his mind, and it wasn’t going our way.

As we left, my daughter pointed out the racism, the anti-Blackness, which I felt too - there was just something about his attitude, and the way he looked at my daughter and me in particular as if we were less than nothing. Our radar for those things is super-sharp!

(If you’re interested, Khafre Jay shared a video from Amy Chen a while back that illustrates some of the ways anti-Black attitudes are learned.)

His attitude could have ruined our whole evening but it didn’t - though it took me a while to shake it off. We went down the road to another Indian restaurant where we didn’t have a reservation, and my daughter went in to check the lay of the land. A couple of minutes later, she beckoned us in - and the restaurant staff couldn’t have been more welcoming.

That saved the evening, because I’ll tell you, discrimination because of your skin colour makes your food taste terrible, no matter how good it is, so I’m glad we were able to have a positive experience with our friends in the end.

Of course, I didn’t leave it there.

It’s not something I often do, but I didn’t see how I could let the anti-Blackness stand, so I wrote a one-star review on Google and explained exactly why I was unhappy. The restaurant owner’s response was underwhelming and tried to put the blame on us for booking late so I updated my review to highlight what poor customer service that was.

As an addendum, I ate out at a few places while in England (most of them run by white folx) - I only saw a double-take in a couple of them, and those people covered it well. However, it tells me there’s still a long way to go in making all spaces feel safe for everyone.

Have you ever experienced or noticed this happening?

Thanks for reading,

Sharon

Are We Being Served? Eating Out While Black

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© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2023. All Rights Reserved.

Cover photo courtesy of Canva.

I am an anti-racism educator and activist, Co-Founder of Mission Equality, the author of “I’m Tired of Racism”, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast.