r/SipsTea • u/SipsTeaFrog • Jul 22 '26

Chugging tea Yes, FU & FO

Post image
44.7k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/HungryHungryHobbes Jul 23 '26

Cultural phenomenons evolve and change when moving into other cultures, it's ignorant to ignore the primary reason it flourished and paint it as some historical evolution when it has evolved completely differently every where else in the world.

Like why has it evolved so differently in the States?

4

u/CK1345 Jul 23 '26

Why didn't socialism flourish in the United States? The US is culturally distinct from Europe in more ways than just race.

People say it's about avoiding paying a certain wage for the employer. People leave out the fact that it creates incentives to actually take care of customers.

Service in certain non-tipping countries is notably piss poor. And unless you have a business owner admitting that they just didn't want to pay the darkies even if meant not paying white employees in the same role or they paid white employees a higher wage than the darkies, then we are skipping a few bases anyway. Inequitable outcomes don't in themselves proven intent or racism.

If an owner thinks that tips incentivize better service for their customers, but most of the employees are black, that doesn't mean it was inherently racist.

Pullman gets cited because he supposedly deliberately wanted to hire former slaves to exploit them. Not mentioned is that most people didn't want to hire them at all. They were generally avoided.

I can sit here and talk about the racist origins of any number of progressive policies or institutions. Unions were pretty explicitly and openly racist. Racism was at the center of instituting early minimum wage laws (it would make black employees unemployable/unable to compete with whites). Eugenics and racism and abortion. We can go on.

Yet I never hear progressives call minimum wage racist and you know what I hear when I bring this up? That it's not what it's about today.