Earlier this month Mike Dzange, a waiter at a Camps Bay restaurant called The Bungalow sparked a Twitter debate and quite a few columns when he opted to include “2 BLACKS” on the docket of a couple he was serving.
The couple was black, as was the waiter – and while that doesn’t preclude the possibility of the waiter himself having internalised some racist attitudes (here, simply meaning that he might never use that shorthand for white couples), it does make it less likely that he was intending to demean this couple.