\n<\/p>\n
Crystal Wilsey, a cashier at a Cinnabon franchise in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, said some unforgivable things to a Somali couple who had the temerity to request more caramel on a pecan cinnamon roll. But I don\u2019t think she should have been summarily fired.<\/p>\n
Wilsey\u2019s is just the latest high-profile tale of an American who lost her job on account of a viral video. The racism she\u2019s accused of is not debatable. In the TikTok video that circulated last week, Wilsey, a 43-year-old white woman, hurled a racist epithet at her customers and declared, \u201cI am racist, and I\u2019ll say it to the whole entire world.\u201d She gestured to her crotch and added: \u201cSuck it!\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the Somali couple, before the camera started rolling, Wilsey had called the woman\u2019s hijab a \u201cwitchcraft bandana.\u201d Wilsey alleges that the couple had been harassing her, but she has not provided any details to substantiate that claim.<\/p>\n
When I saw the video, I naturally sympathized with the Somali couple. The slurs came at a time when Somali Americans are being persistently targeted in racist attacks from the right, including by President Donald Trump himself. And yet, as repugnant as Wilsey\u2019s behavior was, I couldn\u2019t help but consider that she was a single mother whose wages helped feed a child.<\/p>\n
Cinnabon was quick to terminate Wilsey\u2019s employment and declare that her actions didn\u2019t reflect the \u201cvalues of Cinnabon.\u201d Progressives who abhor racism may applaud this move. But as a socialist, I can\u2019t easily take the side of a billion-dollar corporation over that of an ordinary worker. (Cinnabon is owned by the Georgia-based conglomerate GoTo Foods, which also owns Auntie Anne\u2019s, Schlotzsky\u2019s, and many other brands popular in the South.)<\/p>\n
Sure, Wilsey might not be a great fit for a customer-facing position. Her critics online also point to her long rap sheet, which includes charges of child endangerment, disorderly conduct, marijuana possession, and driving while intoxicated. We should nevertheless resist the urge to tell a simple moral story that celebrates someone losing their livelihood. That job at the shopping mall may be the bare minimum she needs to support herself.<\/p>\n
The lack of proper labor protections that allows for workers to lose their job over a single incident can cut in more than one direction. A Starbucks worker in Middletown, Ohio, was fired in September for writing \u201cracists fav drink\u201d on someone\u2019s cup after they ordered a Mint Majesty tea with two honeys, reportedly Charlie Kirk\u2019s order of choice. NPR documented numerous cases of people\u2014schoolteachers, firefighters, military members\u2014losing their job for sharing negative opinions of Kirk online following his assassination. A health-care employee in Kentucky lost her job in 2023 for using a racial slur in a comment to a Facebook group for a youth football league.<\/p>\n
Not everyone is equally vulnerable to being fired on the basis of one-off accusations. In a high-profile 2018 case, Smith College disciplined a janitor for alleged racism toward a Black student, but a formal investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing on the janitor\u2019s part. Two years later, the then-editor of British Vogue, Ghanian-born Edward Enninful, complained about being \u201cracially profiled\u201d by a security guard who asked him to enter the building where he worked through the loading bay. The guard was dismissed from the site in the midst of the pandemic and placed under investigation by his employer.<\/p>\n
In each of these cases, the workers\u2019 actions have carried a different moral valence\u2014some repugnant, some careless, some ambiguous. But in all of them, an employer has presented a moral rationale for withdrawing a worker\u2019s livelihood. Workers have too little legal protection against hasty or arbitrary decisions in this regard, and the public has gotten too comfortable responding with schadenfreude.<\/p>\n
I am not arguing that all workers should have guaranteed jobs for life. Employees sometimes lose jobs for cause, such as when they fail to do assigned tasks or they endanger either their co-workers or their employer\u2019s business. But the impulse to celebrate a worker\u2019s firing is one we should check. Employers should be held rigorously to account for their reasons and procedures when they fire workers, even those who are guilty of repugnant acts such as hurling racist abuse or calling a customer \u201cracist\u201d because they ordered Kirk\u2019s favorite drink. This is especially true in the United States, which lacks a strong social safety net. Losing a job can be catastrophic. In a better America, firing a worker would require an exhaustive process, including disciplinary action prior to dismissal, and involve representation by workers\u2019 bodies. Such a process might still have ended by terminating Wilsey\u2019s employment. In this better world, unemployed workers would also have the means to support themselves until they return to the workforce.<\/p>\n
Those of us on the left should be fighting to improve protections for workers of all races, and thereby for the betterment of people\u2019s material conditions regardless of their views. Progressives should not write off any segment of the working class as beyond the pale. We should instead sow working-class solidarity as an antidote to the racial divisions the right cynically promotes.<\/p>\n
Maybe I\u2019m naive, or an incurable socialist. But I\u2019d like to think that even if a worker is racist to my face, I\u2019ll never ask for their dismissal. I\u2019ll try instead to appeal to our common interest in improving the conditions of our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Crystal Wilsey, a cashier at a Cinnabon franchise in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, said some unforgivable things to a Somali couple who had the temerity to request more caramel on a pecan cinnamon roll. But I don\u2019t think she should have been summarily fired. Wilsey\u2019s is just the latest high-profile tale of an American who lost her<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1731,1873,20572,3982],"class_list":{"0":"post-37066","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-celebrate","9":"tag-firing","10":"tag-racists","11":"tag-wont"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}