So you sit down in the salon chair to get your hair done... and get smacked in the head with some every day racism. That's what happened to an Asian woman who recently saw herself described as "chinky eyes" on a receipt at a Manhattan hair salon. Yup, the racial receipt. We know it well.
Briana Tae was getting her hair blown out at the Drybar in Murray Hill in anticipation of her upcoming nursing school pinning ceremony. But when she saw the receipt slip describing her service, she saw that under the category "Description" one of the employees had scrawled the derogatory slur to describe her.
"I'm sorry, what?" Tae wrote in a Facebook post, sharing a photo of the receipt. "I was the ONLY customer waiting with my friend and rather than describe me by my hair that was in a bun or by my black jacket or as a girl with a friend, I was described as a girl with chinky eyes."
So I’m sitting in my chair, relaxing, excited to get my hair blown out for my nursing school pinning ceremony tomorrow....
Posted by Bree Tae on Monday, December 17, 2018
Tae confronted the employee who wrote the slur, but the woman apparently didn't see a problem with it.
"She could not understand why it was an issue and why it was highly inappropriate to write such a description," Tae says. "She tried to make me feel somewhat better by saying she had chinky eyes too."
I'm sorry, but you do not want someone like this working the front desk, or frankly anywhere, in your store.
Drybar seems to agree. A spokesperson from the company's corporate office tells CBS2 that they have a zero tolerance for racism, and the employee involved in the situation is no longer working there.
"There was recently an unacceptable issue in one of our shops where a stylist described a client in a completely inappropriate way. We sincerely apologize for the hurt his has caused." the company posted on its Facebook page. "We do not tolerate racism. The employee was immediately terminated, and we are committed to working harder on improving our training to ensure this does not happen again."
Honestly, why does this even require training? It should be obvious and just plain decent for any employee or any regular person in life, generally, to not refer to someone as "chinky" anything.
