Racism today

For the last few days, the Chicago area has been jarred by a racist incident at a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in suburban Naperville, IL.

Here is NBC News's summary of the incident (not surprisingly, the story is now going national):

Buffalo Wild Wings has fired two employees after a family of mostly black people was told to move tables because a white couple didn’t want to sit next to them.

Mary Vahl went to the Buffalo Wild Wings in Naperville, Illinois, outside Chicago, on Oct. 26 with a party of 18, which she described as “a group of minorities, mostly consisting of African Americans” in a Facebook post that has gone viral.As the host was setting up their table, Vahl says they were told a regular customer at a table of two said he didn’t want to be seated next to them because of their race. Vahl and her party sat there anyway.
“We don’t give him the satisfaction and told the host we’ll sit where they set us up,” she wrote on Facebook.
After ordering a few things, Vahl and her party were told they had to switch tables, but they refused, she detailed on Facebook.

After management made “excuses” for why they had to switch tables, Vahl and her party eventually left, and went to Hooters instead, appalled by the way they were treated at the wings chain. 

I suppose there is no need for me to explain how outrageous this incident is, nor to register here my own disgust that anyone can be treated this way, anywhere.  Frankly, as a resident of the Chicago area, I'm embarrassed.  We should be better than this.

When I heard the report, my initial reaction was, "That sounds too bad to be true."  I had a similar instinct when the initial reports of Jussie Smollett's now-discredited claim of being attacked by two white men wearing MAGA hats first hit the airwaves.  It was all too pat to be true - it sounded more like a caricature than something that really happened.  But in this case, nobody, including Buffalo Wild Wings, is denying that the Naperville incident happened as reported.

I suppose there are two levels of issues.  One is the difficult-to-fathom insensitivity and, I am guessing, cowardice of the Buffalo Wild Wings employees who, rather than confronting a racist in the full ugly manifestation of his racism, instead deferred to his wishes.  Maybe they thought asking the African American party to move would minimize the chances of causing a scene and disrupting other diners.

But at the root of it is the racist himself.  I suppose he didn't break any laws.  But that sort of public evil needs to be faced, and it needs to be named.

Naperville is the largest of Chicago's suburbs, but it's not especially diverse.  About three quarters of its residents are white.  Its median family income is about $130K, which means it is, on the whole, pretty affluent. It's an education center, with seven college and university campuses, and it's the center b of Illinois' high-tech corridor.  Its Congressional representative, Bill Foster, is a Democrat from the technocratic mold (he's a metrics and statistics wizard, which provided his entree into politics).  I don't claim to be intimately familiar with the town, but I don't think of it as a hotbed of racism - certainly not the overt ugliness on display in this incident.  Let's hope that this racist patron, whoever he is, is an anomaly for the Chicago area.