"Dining while black": tipping as social artifact.

Hiring practices at the restaurants covered by this study suggest a pattern of differential hiring practices and a form of employee "steering" toward front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house positions. Nearly all of the respondents reported that front-of-the-house positions tended to be filled by white Americans, while people of color were usually given back-of-the-house positions, especially those that offered lesser status and lower pay. In that regard, one hostess noted,

Um, it's ... predominantly white [laugh].

Everybody who works, who works at any

of the restaurants I have, like especially

server-wise has been white. Anybody of

any other ethnicity has been either in the

kitchen or um, yeah, either like a line

cook or a dishwasher.... If there is a

black person in the restaurant, urn, or

even like a Hispanic person, they'll usually

be in the kitchen.

Another hostess elaborated using front-and back-of-the-house descriptions, as follows:

I think the back of the house, the people

like the cooks and cleaners, the

majority are African American. The

front, the hostesses are all white, and

maybe there are three servers who are

black.... There's like one black manager

and five white ones. The majority

of the back of the house are African

American.

The responses of our respondents regarding their restaurants are similar to reports from other institutions where few white Americans have close, equal-status, personal contacts with people of color. (35) Many of our respondents had to pause to think of any people of color with whom they had worked. For instance, one server asked us to give her a minute to "rack her brain" as she tried to recall a single person of color with whom she worked. Another respondent, a server who had worked in a variety of front- and back-of-the-house positions in her twenty-five years of experience was shocked when she realized the following:

In fact, I don't know that I've ever

worked in a restaurant--in all the years

that I've worked--that I've worked next

to a black server! That I've ever had

that ... that I've ever even had that situation!

I can't ever remember, looking

back, that I've ever worked with a black

server! Um....

As the veteran server's account above suggests, one can work for decades in a restaurant without having the opportunity to have an equal-status contact with a person of color. When asked to reflect on that realization, this server elaborated,

I don't know! I find it bizarre! Until right

now, I guess I never really put a lot of

thought into it, but since you're asking ...

um, I would say it probably has a

lot to do with race ... that, unfortunately,

if you are black, they don't want you to

be in the service industry, where you're

out in the front of the house--on the

front lines, you know. Um, maybe they

think that the customers think that

blacks are dirty ... um, I don't know! I

don't know what the reasoning would

be, but I do ... looking back on it right

now find it pretty strange that there wasn't

more of a mixture of blacks and

whites working side by side!

Notice that this respondent quickly speculated that customers will think "blacks are dirty" and that those who do the hiring would not want black Americans in front-of-the-house positions. Not only does this reasoning involve an egregious anti-black belief, but this is known as "consumer discrimination," a form of employment discrimination in which employers hire employees based on the racial composition of their consumer base or by attempting to anticipate consumers' racial desires. (36) In particular, this type of discrimination is found to affect positions that involve direct customer contact. (37)

Although our study involved race, we found that many of the accounts given by respondents indicated that positions within the restaurant align not only by race but also by gender. Every respondent in the sample mentioned that white American males filled the management and ownership positions in the restaurant, with few people of color or women working in such positions. One server tried to recall a black manager but could not do so:

I'm trying to remember if I've ever

worked with ... a manager in a restaurant

that hasn't, that has been anything

other than white? No, in all three restaurants

I worked at, all of my managers

have, all my managers have been white

males, with the exception [that] I've had

two female managers, you know, that

have kind of come and gone, you know,

a couple months period.... Both of them

were white.

The intersection of race and gender was also prominent for the hostess position, as this server recalled that the hostess position also required a certain look to be hired:

I had one black girl that worked at the

Shrimp House, out of the two years that I

worked there, as a hostess. And the only

reason I think that she was allowed to

work there, was because she was really

cute ... and she was thin, and she was

very trendy like all the other cute little

hostess-types that they hired ... and she

was a friend of someone who knew

someone. She came with a very good

recommendation, but, um, yeah. That's

the only time! In the two years of working

there, I never worked with a black

server.

The peculiar language used by this respondent, indicating that the young hostess was "allowed" to work at the restaurant, is worth noting. Perhaps this is to suggest that she would be prohibited from holding that position if she did not meet the criteria of being cute, thin, and trendy. In short, despite her skin color, she was enough like all the other "cute little hostess-types" and recommended through a personal contact for the job. (38)

In their totality, these study findings suggest a pattern of differential hiring practices and a form of steering employees toward different positions. At the same time, many respondents had been able to successfully navigate their employment within the restaurant without having to examine how privilege may have played a role in their own hiring or how their racial identity marked their positions within the restaurant. Nearly all respondents worked in the front of the house, and they consequently had had little opportunity to work side by side with people of color. That situation reinforced certain prejudicial attitudes, as explained next.

Setting the Backstage for a Culture of White Servers

The "behind the scenes" or backstage context of the culture of workers is shaped by the dichotomous racial composition of front- and back-of-the-house positions. The interview data reveal that a "culture of white servers" exists in the restaurants described in our sample. In this culture, white servers relate to each other in sharing the experience of dealing directly with customers and working for tips. Differential access to server positions excludes people of color from joining the ranks of this culture of white servers, as many respondents revealed. As one server pointed out, "There are a lot of racial divides in the restaurant."

Respondents shared that these divides provided a means by which white servers were able to actively exclude themselves from other workers backstage, using a private racial language that was deliberately hidden from people of color and from managers. The racial language reflected a relatively widespread anti-black belief system that took the form of the use of racial code words and a reliance on racial stereotypes to guide the level of service black Americans would receive. The interview data cited numerous examples of how white workers actively engaged in backstage racial and stereotypical language to denigrate black American diners and how this shaped their front-stage dining experiences.

Canadians, Cousins, Moolies, and "White People"

We found that many of the restaurant workers described in this study actively engaged in racially based coding of people, actions, and ideas. This backstage, codified racial language is consistent with Toni Morrison's term "race talk," meaning coding primarily used to degrade "others"--that is, people of color. (39) One respondent spoke directly about servers' use of racial language in backstage areas:

It's only behind closed doors. Like, you

know, like they would never go out into

like "the real world" and, you know, like

call somebody a "nigger," or anything

like that. Like they wouldn't do that. It's

not that type of overt, prejudiced racism.

But it is a closed-door joking, kidding

around.

That assessment of the backdrop by which white servers can openly share racist sentiments among other white servers begins to reveal the backstage existence of race talk in the restaurant. To avoid using the term nigger even in the restaurant's backstage, white servers in one respondent's restaurant used the word Canadians as a code word for black Americans, as follows:

When a table, you know, a black table

were to come into the restaurant, a lot of

people ... there's a code word at my restaurant

that's called "Canadian," and so,

being a hostess, I get asked a lot by the

servers, don't seat me with "Canadians.'"

And that's known throughout the restaurant