I have a friend who was adopted from Korea as a baby. For many, many years, she’s worked a Saturday side-gig waitressing at a local diner that specializes in breakfast. Here’s the super racist thing that happened to her last weekend.
She approached a table to take an order, and the woman sitting there was perusing her menu.
“What can I get you?” my friend asked.
“I’ll have . . . . . . “ the woman then looked up, directly at her. “An eggroll.”
She followed this with, “I mean an omelette.”
I feel like there’s a lot to unpack here, because at first I’m tempted to find a good excuse for the slip, since we’ve all said stupid shit by accident. But I find it pretty indefensible, for several reasons.
1) Nothing even close to an eggroll is on the menu at this restaurant.
2) The pronunciation of “eggroll” is not even close to “omelette.”
3) She didn’t offer a correction that was even close to “eggroll,” like “Oh, I mean cinnamon roll.”
Like this would literally be the equivalent of a customer looking up at my white face and saying, “I’ll have a cracker. I mean the tomato soup.” And then offering no apology.
I think what burned my friend the most was that the woman then tipped $1 on a $40 meal, so she didn’t even attempt to make amends for her insult.
If you’re going to step so many decades backward in your conversation, at least have the decency to pay it forward.