Olive Garden fired a manager working for them in Indiana after complying to a white customer’s request for a non-Black server.
Amira Donahue, a 16-year-old host at the Olive Garden in Evansville said that the white couple specifically targeted her and another Black worker.
According to Donahue, the woman said “awful things” about her, which includes asking if she was “even from here”, and insinuated that she should “work at a strip club instead.”
She wrote on Facebook, “All I said to this woman was ‘sorry I don’t know,’ ‘have a nice day’ and ‘excuse me’ when she was standing in the way of a extremely busy restaurant.”
As soon as the woman was seated, Donahue said that the customer demanded for a white server, and then screamed at her in the middle of the restaurant’s lobby.
“She should’ve been kicked out ASAP. But I guess the racist customer is more valuable than your black employees that were left in tears,” she added.
Donahue also said that the woman ate only half her food and demanded for a refund.
One of the customers who witnessed the incident wrote on Facebook that when the customer asked to speak with the manager, the manager simply obliged.
Olive Garden released a emailed statement that the manager involved is no longer working for them.
They also assured that their company has a “zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind.”
Meanwhile, Donahue said in an interview that she is still hurt after the incident.
“I would never expect it to be so apparent in public like it’s 2020, not 1920 and I feel like it should take more than social media to get a problem like this out there”
According to reports, the Evansville National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is currently investigating the incident.