It’s always comforting to visit the South and not receive any service at all, whatsoever, as a person of color.

We tried to eat at this popular spot called Tupelo Honey en route back from Great Smokey Mountain National Park yesterday in Asheville, North Carolina. Since there were no free tables in the evening for dinner, I decided to sit at the bar and wait for Chris to park the car and figured we could eat and drink at the bar. Well, I never had the opportunity to eat or drink anything, not even water, because the bartender completely ignored me for the entire 20 minutes I sat at the bar until I decided to walk out. There was no way I was going to give hard-earned money to an establishment that chooses to completely ignore me and treat me like I don’t matter or don’t exist.

Not only did the bartender ignore me several times when I tried to say hello, but when I finally raised my voice and asked to see a menu, she didn’t even make eye contact with me and said, “sure, I can get that to you” as she looked away from me. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt given it was peak dinner time and so she was probably busy, but she proceeded to have small chitchat with all the other couples sitting around me, giving them drinks and more water, getting their bills processed, so why would it have been so difficult just to say hi to me and hand me a simple menu?

We’ve traveled to the South so many times and have received amazing service from every state and restaurant down here, so it’s sad to see that the bartender during dinner time on Sundays at Tupelo Honey wants to perpetuate the same treatment that the Greensboro Four, four activist African American men, received when they tried to sit down at a “Whites-Only” counter at the Woolworth’s back in February 1960 and were refused service. It’s like a teeny tiny fraction of the hate and bigotry that people of color had to face in our country back then, just right in face today in 2018. If this wasn’t based on race, I have no idea what else it could have been based on — the fact that she maybe didn’t like the way I looked or was dressed? Regardless, it was wrong and terrible.

Sometimes, people forget that segregation as this country knew it was not just dividing whites from blacks; it was physically dividing all white people from anyone else of color, even Jewish people. Yes, that includes Asians. So yes, that’s people who look like us. To the white people then, and some white people now given the white supremacists who still rein in this country, people who look like Chris and me will never be good enough. We are a threat to white America. So they can go fuck themselves and stop leading their delusional lives.