How Low Will White Guilt Go? Black Owned Restaurant in New Orleans Charges White Customers More For Their Food to Showcase Racial Income Inequality... and Whites Pay...

How low will white people go to pay their 21st century indulgences, debt incurred from centuries of unearned white privilege? White guilt runs deep within a large percentage of the white population, and it grows with each passing generation, where the elite have crafted a system where those white people practicing the maxim "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" are rewarded handsomely. 

Oh, white people will go plenty low. [Food Stall Serves Up A Social Experiment: White Customers Asked To Pay More, NPR, 3-2-18]:

Can a $12 lunch change the way people think about racial wealth disparity in America? How about a $30 lunch? That's the premise behind a social experiment playing out in a New Orleans food stall.

Not from The Onion...

Chef Tunde Way opened his pop-up stall in the city's Roux Carre venue in early February. The listed price for the Nigerian food is $12. But when white people walk up to order, they are asked whether they want to pay $30. Why? "It's two-and-a half times more than the $12 meal, which reflects the income disparity" between whites and African-Americans in New Orleans, says Wey.

The median income for African-American households in New Orleans fell from $32,332 in 2000 to $27,812 in 2013 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to The Data Center's New Orleans Index at Ten. Over the same time, median income for white households in the city remained roughly the same, $61,117 to $60,070. In 2013, the median household income for African-Americans in metro New Orleans was 54 percent lower than for whites.

Wey says that when customers come up to his window to place an order, he tells them that his food stall aims to engage people on the topic of racial income and wealth disparities and to share statistics on these disparities. He then informs them that customers who identify as white are being asked to pay the higher $30 price to reflect these disparities. These customers also have the option to pay the listed $12 price. The difference between the $12 and $30 meals, customers are informed, will be redistributed to minorities who buy food at the stall. How do white customers react to the proposition?

"Some of them are enthusiastic, some of them are bamboozled a bit by it," Wey says. "But the majority of white folks, nearly 80 percent, decided to pay."

"That was definitely higher than we expected," says Anjali Prasertong, a graduate student in public health at Tulane University who helped Wey design the experiment and collect data.

As Prasertong points out, "It's not a strict scientific study." One limitation of this experiment is that the customers who came to the stall were all in a higher-than-average income bracket. Prasertong says that may be one reason why the vast majority of customers of color – African-Americans, Latinos and Asians – declined to sign up to receive the redistributed money made from charging whites the higher price.

As of Feb. 28, the day the premise of the experiment was revealed in a Times-Picayune article, 64 people had completed the survey, which included 32 whites, Prasertong says. Twenty-five white customers paid the extra $18, adding up to a pool of $450. Only six people of color had signed up for distributions, which they would split evenly among them, $75 each.

The food stall — called Saartj, a reference to a 19th-century black South African woman infamously paraded as a "freak show" in Europe — will be open through Sunday, though the data collection part of the experiment is now over.

No matter how low you think white people will go, they'll go infinitely lower.

Irredeemable?

Oh yeah... irredeemable.