Ignorance is not a valid excuse and to be quite honest, I’m sick of having the race card played during every discussion imaginable.

It’s the middle of a busy Saturday night. There are 150 people with reservations and an unknown number of walk-in customers to come. Ten servers are in the swing of the evening providing service and a dining experience to be remembered by.

All is well, and all are happy, until one server is sat with a table of eight blacks.

“Damnit,” the server says, “why in my section? Did I make the hostess mad?”

Most people wouldn’t dare to vocalize the issue of race and tipping outside the restaurant, but I think it’s an extremely important issue that needs to be addressed. It’s a concern I’d venture to say the good majority of servers share and shouldn’t have to.

All of it seems to come down to ignorance and a lack of education. Either that, or blacks are just consistently cheap in their tipping.

Let me emphasize that a server in the state of Wisconsin is paid $2.33 per hour. That means that all of his or her income is generated from the tips received in a given night.

One really bad tip can spoil an entire night’s worth of work and create feelings of tension, hostility and downright bitterness. In waiting on blacks, it’s been my experience that no matter how hard I try, no matter what lengths I go to to provide exceptional service, I’m lucky to receive 10 percent.

Of course, this is discouraging for future tables I am given that are composed of blacks. Most likely, I will give them less attention than my other tables because past experience shows I won’t get paid for the service I’ve rendered.

I’d like to say this never happens as I have high service standards and ethics, but the reality of the situation is I need to make 25 percent on all my white tables in order to balance out the tips I receive from blacks.

A valid question to ask is can the expectation of a lower tip from blacks often lead to poor service? Many servers feel they don’t want to wait on a table because they’re black or foreign. This may mean the server will tend to give them less quality service than his or her other tables because of the history and consistency of poor tipping by blacks. It seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The number of guests a server receives in a given night is distributed (or attempted to be) equally between all servers. If I have eight blacks in my section and miss out on any combination of whites totaling eight, the 10 percent (or less) tip I receive from the table of blacks will pale in comparison to the money I could have made had they not been sat in my section.

I’m not saying any particular race is superior or inferior to another.

Though one may argue the writing that follows is racist because of what it implies about race and tipping, tipping is not a factor in the difference of human character. It is a reflection of what’s right, what’s wrong and the complete abomination of ignorance.

There is a very high occurrence of poor tipping by most blacks who dine out (and by foreigners visiting the United States who claim ignorance to American tipping customs). This isn’t an opinion I went in to the service industry holding; it’s a fact that terrifies me when I approach a table.

A study performed in 2003 by Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration researcher Michael Lynn confirms my fear is more reality than phobia.

The study reports many waiters and waitresses feel that blacks generally tip less than restaurant diners who are white. The study found that blacks tip, on average, 20 percent less than whites.

Additionally, restaurant workers of all races dislike waiting on black people because they assume the tips will be less no matter how good the service.

“Servers do widely believe that blacks tip less,” said Lynn.

In a July 11, 2003, article from npr.org, Gerald Fernandez, president and founder of the MultiCultural Foodservice & Hospitality Alliance, which represents food servers and restaurateurs, said blacks don’t tip well because they don’t know any better.

Fernandez says blacks have avoided sit-down restaurants because cultural elements institutionalized racism. Fernandez says racism exists in the restaurant industry and education about tipping is behind the discrepancy in Lynn’s study.

“How do people learn about tipping?” Fernandez says in the article. “If you don’t go, you don’t know.”

Ignorance is not a valid excuse and to be quite honest, I’m sick of having the race card played during every discussion imaginable. If choosing take-out or self-service eateries has worked for you so far, stick with it. Don’t negatively impact my life and ability to make rent because you don’t know any better. Either that, or change. Start tipping appropriately.

Lynn’s study found that 63 percent of blacks and 30 percent of whites didn’t understand that the standard restaurant tip in the United States is 15 to 20 percent.

Today’s standards are different still from Lynn’s study. In my experience, a 15 percent tip denotes average service while a 20 percent tip is given for good service. Anything above 20 percent demonstrates remarkable service or a server who went extraordinarily above the norm for service standards.

“Blacks tip about 20 percent less than whites,” said Lynn. This number was concluded from studies conducted in Houston, Lynn said, and is not necessarily nationally representative.

Lynn said the American restaurant industry should take action to inform people about the basics of leaving a tip. He urges the use of advertisements, educational pamphlets and placing tipping information on menus.

I suggest staying at home or just plain having the courtesy to ask those who dine out frequently what appropriate tipping is given the nature of the service provided. It’s different for every profession offering a service generally tipped on.

Am I racist? No. But I am bitter about waiting on those who consistently tip poorly.

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