Are restaurants like Flight ‘plantation societies’?
You would think that a restaurant in a city where 63% of the population is African American would work to purge any specks of racism from its menu.
But at Flight Restaurant & Wine Bar, it looks like it might have been part of the main course.
Recently, more than a dozen people who claimed to be former employees of Flight, an exclusive downtown restaurant, posted allegations on social media that they were instructed to seat Black patrons at the back of the restaurant or on the balcony so that they wouldn’t be seen by people on the street.
Apparently, white people make the best window advertisements.
They also said Flight and its sister restaurant Southern Social in Germantown avoided hiring Black people for jobs that would require them to interact with customers.
After days of protesters packing the streets in front of Flight and its sister restaurant in Midtown, Porch & Parlor, Russ Graham, the restaurants’ co-owner, was ousted. Co-owner Tom Powers said Graham’s stakes in Flight, Porch &
Parlor, Southern Social and Coastal Fish Company would be bought out.
A statement form Flight posted Tuesday on Facebook said the restaurant group would investigate the discrimination allegations and work on ways to resolve them, including hiring a human resources firm to evaluate its policies, procedures and standards.
But the allegations about the practices at Flight and Southern Social reflect similar allegations about practices at other fine-dining restaurants — practices that adhere to the notion that too many Black people, whether as patrons or as waiters or hosts, will tarnish their corporate image and repel white patrons. Last Father’s Day in Jacksonville, Florida, for example, a patron at Ruth’s Chris Steak House inside the Doubletree Hotel on the St. Johns River brought her family there for dinner and was told that their reservation had been changed to a “private dining area.”
The dining area turned out to be one of the hotel’s empty banquet rooms, with no river view. And all of the diners in the room were Black.
Also, a Memphis man, Deshun Fletcher, is suing Ruth’s Chris for discrimination over an October 2019 incident. He says a white patron began yelling racial slurs at him, and when the waiter did nothing to stop it, he confronted the man.
Yet Fletcher said he and his party were asked to leave while the white diner calling him the n-word was allowed to stay.
Tanya K. Hernandez, a law professor at Fordham University in New York City who specializes in anti-discrimination law and implicit bias, said such practices and incidents aren’t shocking.
“In fine dining, restaurants are known to be plantation societies,” Hernandez said. “They have the front of the room, the wait staff and the maitre d’, to be white, or light, and the people in the back who are preparing the food, washing the dishes, the people who you rarely see, who are Black.”
Hernandez said that even when workers in the back, like the Black workers whom Flight allegedly didn’t want to mingle with customers, try to apply for better-paying jobs in the front, they encounter what she calls a “racialized hierarchy.”
“They’re never told about job openings,” Hernandez said. “They say in fine dining that the looks really matter. At some of these restaurants they want photos and headshots (of applicants for host and waiter jobs), and when employees apply who are too dark, they are told they don’t have the right look. …
“That’s how what happens with the (Black) workers apply to what happens with the (Black) customers. They get put into a certain category because they (the restaurant) want a certain look.” While the allegations of racism at Flight and Southern Social are being investigated, Graham’s ouster is a big reveal.
Also, some are skeptical that those restaurants would engage in racist practices in a city where most of the people are Black.
But that’s the thing about racism. It’s never logical. And if a restaurant, or any other business for that matter, believes it can get away with such practices with Black people not noticing, it will try to do that.
That’s why the Black Lives Matter protests at Flight and Porch & Parlor are particularly significant. They are forcing people to focus on another area of entrenched racism: restaurants that would rather insult Black patrons and demean Black workers to cater to white prejudices, or assumptions of such prejudices.
For fine-dining restaurants, what these protests mean is that the days are over when they can treat Black patrons and workers like old furniture that they throw blankets over to conceal from the guests.
Especially when Black people’s money and labor should earn them equality and not invisibility.