Cracker from Another Planet

On one hand, poor restaurant service is not uncommon. Everybody has stories about long waits, botched meal orders, and generalized incompetence that comes with a visit to corporate-owned dining outlets in exit-ramp America.

On the other hand, during a recent visit with my wife to Cracker Barrel in rural Ohio (during a cross-country drive) I remember feeling uncomfortable. Apparently there's something about our manner of speaking, mode of dress, or gait that suggested we were quite different than the other folks who were mowing down beans and ham. Our collared shirts, the absence of agricultural-themed baseball caps - and, most tellingly, a woman without knit patterns on her frock - this all seemed to say "outsider" to the other diners who gaped at us as we took our table.

And we're crackers, after all.

So I'm willing to entertain the possibility that Chris Rock's mother might have been the victim of racism when she sat at a table for 30 minutes while the servers and managers glided past, waiting on other customers. There are always some people who are ready to be offended - hoping anxiously to slip on a banana peel so they can file a liability lawsuit - but until any countervailing facts are known we should take such anecdotes at face value. Service-sector corporations are only as good as their most uneducated employees, and nobody should be pleased that the residue of centuries of racism appears to linger in places like Cracker Barrel.