A St. Louis man got more than he bargained for when he ordered a Pizza Hut pizza last week...
Pizza Hut customer Karl Mayberry was outraged by the name on his Pizza Hut receipt: Instead of Karl, he found "BIGBLACK." As WALB TV of South Georgia reports, Mayberry first thought BIGBLACK was a name of a pizza. But no, this label was used to identify the customer.
Mayberry complained to the company, and Pizza Hut gave him $100 in gift cards and a letter of apology. The company also said they would implement employee training to prevent future errors.
Is this racism? Most of the comments on the popular blog The Consumerist say no. Many commenters took a hard-lined approach, telling Mayberry to "get over it," while a select few cited this as overt racism and said, "it's crap like this that keeps society from moving forward."
While I believe the clerk taking Mayberry's order may have used BIGBLACK merely as an identifier and not as a racist statement against his/her customer, I think we have to look at the broader social context of this event. Sure, the cashier may not have heard or understood Mayberry's name, but if the customer were a white man, would the clerk have put "BIGWHITE?" Probably not.
There are a myriad other physical markers besides race, and I would argue that we tend to use those other identifiers when we refer to white people. We're more likely to mention clothes, hairstyle or color, eyes, iPods or cell phones when the person we're describing is white. But if we're confronted with a minority, our first marker is their "color."
Pizza Hut apologized. They promised corrective and preventative measures. The issue, like so many race issues, is not one of racist individuals. Rather, it's the systemic and unexamined white privilege that allows us to simultaneously normalize and ignore whiteness while emphasizing "otherness" in minorities.
Just imagine the outcry if the news report had identified the Pizza Hut employee as "PUNYWHITEHIGHSCHOOLER."
Photo Credit: WALB TV
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