| rev:text
| - We had a horribly racist encounter with one of the co-owners at this establishment last night. I will need to find somewhere else to go where I am treated with respect as a black person. We will never return and it should be avoided altogether by black people and probably all PoC. I am still shaken by my experience.
I was there with a couple of friends last night and Biggie came on the playlist. A table of white people next to us started belting out the lyrics: "IF YOU DON'T KNOW NOW YOU KNOW, N*GGER" (with a hard "er", not present in the song). If you know this song at all, this phrase happens many times and it was met with mounting enthusiasm by their group as the song progressed. I have never in my life seen a group of white people so invested in this song or in fact, this word without an ounce of self-consciousness. It occasionally happens in clubs, which is also not okay, but this was an entirely new brand of public behaviour.
I took my phone out to take a video. They kept yelling the word even when I had made eye contact. Even when the table beside me, which also had black people there, had made eye contact. Our white friend went to tell a server that this was happening and that it was awful to sit there and endure white people repeatedly shout the n-word happily.
The server went to tell them that this was making black patrons uncomfortable and it turned out *THIS WAS THE MANAGER'S TABLE*. As in, the establishment's white co-owner was at this table with his friends, participating in yelling an anti-black slur at the top of his lungs with no regard for the implications of how this might make black patrons, totally visible to him and his white friends, uncomfortable to say the least. It didn't stop. The server insisted. The co-owner noticed me filming the behaviour and only then came over to our table.
I was not amenable to talking by this point and was ready to leave. He told my friends he was "sorry we felt that way" and defended how this behaviour was okay, getting right up in my friend's face and concocting excuse after excuse (including that they didn't know it was offensive [LOL] and that one of the co-owners was from North Africa [I still fail to see the relevance]). The classic fallback white privilege response of "I have a black friend so this allows me to be racist."
The people at the table next to ours locked eyes with us in horror that he was defending this situation instead of doing literally anything else. They also packed up and left in disgust. I believe the bar owes my group our collective tab back at the least.
The server apologized, extracted us from the situation to talk in the lobby (A+ de-escalation skills- this person needs to be paid more) and continued to apologize profusely. This place is definitively "whitelisted" by a group of black people as super, super racist. It is unequivocally unacceptable for the owner of a business to behave like this in 2017.
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