21.2.09

Racism and McDonalds

I really try not to be racist. I do. I do believe that, given the same opportunities and equal ground, there would be no statistically significant difference in overall performance based on race. It's just that equal ground and same opportunities are not happening, which is why we do have the statistically significant differences. There's nothing deficient or amplified in someone's brain or character only because of skin colour or eye shape.

But working at McDonalds can really strain that belief.
McDonalds has a negative selection bias both for employees and for customers.
While the workers are not all stupid -- there's a lot of slowness that can actually be attributed to things like the computer system being a major pain in the ass* -- the one who's polite and educated and could just as easily get a job with better pay/benefits somewhere else is of course a rare breed.
The customers aren't universally stupid either, but the quality and price of food do mean that a lot of the demographic is people who need to stretch their dollar and/or care about quantity over nutrition or taste.

I wouldn't say that the lazy/rude slacker-to-normal person ratio is any worse for the black staff than it is for the white staff. And I couldn't say that the "people coming through in shitty old car with 4 children in back seat" numbers are higher for any race.

The trouble is, though, that when I have 4 black women on my shift and three of them are overweight and one of them is so happy because her boyfriend is proposing to her when he gets out of prison and two of them will blather about their sex lives in disgusting detail and two of them do less work than anyone else and one of them actually does go around saying "Lawdy Jaysus" -- I don't have a population of normal black people to balance that.

When the white staff is lazy or gossipy or rude or making crude jokes or blathering about how their daughter broke parole and so the cops were at their house at 2 am waking her and her sleaze-ball husband up or whatever -- I know plenty of white people. My brain can process that "white people who think it's funny to make jokes about eskimo masturbation while throwing ice" are a minority, because I only know one person who acts like that out of however many white people I know. It processes that easily.

Same deal for the coming through with a lot of kids, or whatever. There are probably a lot more white girls coming through in low-cut tops and short shorts than there are black girls, a lot more white trash families with too many kids, a lot more white-owned shitty cars held together with duct tape and the braces for overpriced stereosystems -- but in proportion to how many I see on a regular basis, the numbers are blurred.

I know there are black people in town who own businesses, serve on the school board, drive respectable cars and wear a suit to work every day. Or who attend the local university and look like any other university student, just darker-skinned. But university students cling to campus, and elsewise the population is slim enough that I don't see them on a regular basis.

Basically, if you want to see white trash and black stereotypes in a controlled environment, work at McDonalds. But be warned of what starts creeping into your thoughts when you don't see these people in the wild.



*If you say you want a burger only onions... and add a tomato.... actually a meal... and can you supersize that? -- it has to be punched into the computer four times. If the person is taking someone else's money in drivethrough, or has one of the screens on which the buttons don't respond very well, you get mistakes.