Restaurant Charges Whites More

PUBLISHED: 10:43 PM 2 Mar 2018

Pop-Up Restaurant In New Orleans Launches More Expensive “Suggested Price” Option For White Customers

The owner of the restaurant claims he’s charging white customers more to highlight the nation’s supposed "racial wealth gap.”

Just recently, as part of an extremely racist month-long “social experiment,” a chef in Louisiana opened a pop-up restaurant asking white customers to pay more for their meal than everyone else in the name of wealth redistribution.

Just recently, as part of an extremely racist month-long “social experiment,” a chef in New Orleans, Louisiana opened a pop-up restaurant asking white customers to pay more for their meal than everyone else in the name of wealth redistribution.

Specifically, last month, chef Tunde Wey opened up a Nigerian restaurant, called Saartj, that gives white customers the option to pay “$12 for lunch or the suggested price of $30…[while] “black customers are charged $12 and also given the option to collect the $18 paid by a white patron as a way to redistribute wealth.”

According to the website Civil Eats, customers are informed about the option after they order. Before getting into the details, though, they first must listen to a speech about a supposed “racial wealth gap” that exists in the United States.  

“I start by asking them what they think the racial wealth gap is and then share stats about [how it manifests in] New Orleans and nationally,” explained the restaurant’s creator while speaking with reporters. “Most of the time we tend to identify the problem, assign an antagonist, and address the problem,” he added.

The various examples that he uses to support his claim about a “racial wealth gap,” however, are extremely misleading.

One of the stats that he brings up, for example, has to do with higher education increasing a white family’s median income by $113,000 while only increasing a black family’s median income by $60,000. This stat, though, comes from a poorly conducted Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study that looks at income distribution broadly without controlling for important variables.

So far, about 46% of the diners have been black and 45% have been white. Of the white diners, Wey mentioned that 78% of them agreed to pay the higher price. When asked why they decided to do so, he claimed that people are worried about being judged.

“Refusing to pay more comes off as anti-social and people don’t want to be judged for that,” reasoned Wey.

“People look on the other side of the till and see me standing there and they’re thinking that I’m judging them,” he added, noting, “if they couldn’t pay a higher amount, they gave me a list of caveats why they couldn’t.”

Shockingly, though, when the black customers were offered the additional money, 76% turned it down. On top of that, Wey added that he even had to turn down several black customers who tried to pay the “white people’s” price. “Black people have even tried to pay the $30 and I’m like ‘No, it’s not for you,’” he told reporters.

Sadly, racism against white people is becoming increasingly common. Earlier this month, for example, Nick Rust, the chief of the British Horseracing Authority (BHA), gave an extremely racist speech while at the Godolphin Stud and Stable Staff Awards ceremony calling out the industry for having too many white athletes.

“We are fortunate within horse racing to have such a diverse workforce,” began Rust.

“We have a 50-50 gender balance among our stud and racing staff and around a quarter of our workforce are from outside Britain, with more than half of these outside of the European Economic Area. However, diversity does not always mean equality,” he explained before pointing out that 90% of the 265 people nominated to receive an award were white.

“We need to look at what lies behind this and ensure far better representation across the various minority groups in future years,” continued Rust.

“Ensuring equality of opportunity within our sport is something that our relatively newly formed diversity in racing steering group is challenging,” he added, noting, “we need to challenge ourselves as to whether there exists a conscious or unconscious bias within our industry when it comes to issues such as gender, race or disability.”

And several weeks prior to that, Shreena Gandhi, a Religious Studies professor at Michigan State University, published a blatantly racist essay, titled “Yoga and the Roots of Cultural Appropriation,” speaking out against white people who practice yoga.

Specifically, in the essay, which was co-written by Lillie Wolff, a self-described “anti-racist white Jewish organizer, facilitator, and healer” who is focused on “decolonizing” yoga, they argued that “yoga practice in the United States is intimately linked to some of the larger forces of white supremacy.” They also asserted, quite absurdly, that the practice is supposedly “tied up with colonialism.”

To support their position, they wrote, “yoga contributes to our economic system, but never forget this system is one built upon exploitation and commodification of labor, often the labor of black people and people of the global south.”

To clarify, they added, “yoga, like so many other colonized systems of practice and knowledge, did not appear in the American spiritual landscape by coincidence; rather, its popularity was a direct consequence of a larger system of cultural appropriation that capitalism engenders and reifies.” By saying this, Gandhi and Wolff are essentially suggesting that the practice was somehow stolen from Asia, which is utterly absurd.

Incidents like these highlight the fact that, as long as it’s directed toward white people, many on the left are fine with treating people differently based on the color of their skin. This, without a doubt, needs to change.