There is
currently a video making all those side bar “click here” areas of the computer
screen in which a beautiful light brown skinned girl smiles as she tells us
that tipping is an American institution created to disadvantage former slaves
by getting them to work for low hourly wages (if any). She continues by
pointing out that 60% of ‘servers” are females and 40% of those are Black. As
in too many of such “educational” videos, it plays fast and loose with the
truth, primarily (and unfortunately) because, of course, racism does exist in
America, just not under every conceivable rock or integrally with every
institution. Understand - this video, to the uninformed or the eager to accept,
comes across as an indictment of the US for inventing tipping in the post-Civil
War South, claiming that former slave owners created the system to avoid paying
former slaves.
So, what’s my
beef? It is simply that it dilutes the real cause of racial equality and
respect by lying about issues such as this. For the bigot, finding one such
allegation to be false serves as a talking point to negate them all. So, then,
what exactly am I talking about?
The history and
origin of tipping is European and predates the US Civil War by centuries. The
practice of tipping began in Tudor England. (mid 1500s) By the 17th century, it
was expected that overnight guests to private homes would provide sums of
money, known as "vails", to the host’s servants. Soon afterwards, customers began
tipping in London coffeehouses and other commercial establishments. The
etymology for the synonym for tipping, "gratuity" (because we all
feel “gracious” when we tip, right?), dates back either to the 1520s, from
"graciousness", from the French gratuité (14th century) or directly
from Medieval Latin gratuitas, "free gift", probably from earlier
Latin gratuitus, "free, freely given". The meaning "money given
for favor or services" is first attested in the 1530s. So hardly American,
hardly Southern, hardly post war. While it may well have been discriminatory
based on social class, it certainly wasn’t race based.
By the 1900s,
Americans considered tipping to be the norm and, in fact, were frequently
criticized for over tipping (yeah…right!).
Englishmen complained that "liberal but misguided" Americans
tipped too much, leading servants to feel shortchanged by the British. Similarly, a 1908 Travel magazine found that
Americans over tipped but received poorer service because Americans “did not
know how to treat servants and service members.” Why include this information? Because it
points out, that, contrary to the thesis of the video, that Americans actually
tended to tip service persons, race irrelevant, better than Europeans. This
statement is also relevant to metropolitan, urban areas, where race of serving
persons varied over an extreme spectrum. It was Benjamin Franklin in 18th
century Paris who said, "To over-tip is to appear an ass: to undertip is
to appear an even greater ass."
As tipping
became widespread in America, many found it to be antithetical to democracy and
American ideals of equality. In 1891,
journalist Arthur Gaye wrote that a tip should be given to someone "who is
presumed to be inferior to the donor, not only in worldly wealth, but in social
position also." "Tipping, and
the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape,”
William Scott wrote in his 1916 anti-tipping brochure, “The Itching Palm,” in
which he argued that tipping was as "un-American" as "slavery
Prior to 1840, Americans did not tip, or
at least it wasn’t considered tipping to reward a service person for good
service. But, after the Civil War, newly rich Americans visited Europe and
brought the practice back home to show that they had been abroad and knew
genteel rules. A New York Times
editor grumbled that, once tipping got hold in the United States, it spread
rapidly like "evil insects and weeds." Now here’s where the Berkeley
study cited in the video goes off the rails. With no historical citation or
justification, it posits that former slave owners “miffed” (my word) at the
loss of free labor (Slavery wasn’t “free” labor in any case, just uncompensated
to the slave, but costly to the slaveholder) invented (we now know that’s
blatantly false, so let’s say “implemented”) the system of tipping to avoid
paying regular wages to Black employees on railroads and in hotels. So, you
ask, “What’s wrong with that statement?”
To begin, most
freed former slaves in the South were agricultural workers. While the number of slaves owned varied from
one to hundreds, most worked the soil, with a significant but much smaller
percentage owned by city dwellers and serving as house servants. While there is no extant research which
details the numbers regarding how and where these former bondsmen and women
became employed and how they were compensated, this is nonetheless true: The
majority of former agriculturally utilized slaves, male and female, remained on
the land as share croppers. A high percentage of former house servants remained
in service, but we simply have no data on how, or how much, they were
compensated.
Making some
assumptions: first, the video continues to the end to indicate that tipping is
still racist today and states that 60% of waitresses are women and about 40% of
those are Black. Unfortunately, they
have a conflict in that statement with those well-known pollsters, the US
census bureau. As of 1991, the last year for which I could find data, the
numbers are waaay different. While 81.6%
of food servers were women, a mere 4.2% were black. 7.1% were Hispanic, which
means that food service females getting tips as part of compensation were 70%
Caucasian! This directly contradicts the
assertions made in the video. I also need to stress that the not so thinly
veiled implication is that tipping is a way to pay less (it can be for the
employer) and then goes to the illogical conclusion that those working for tips
are under-compensated. While this may be
true for some cases, in most it is not.
Waitresses in metropolitan areas average about $15 hourly in tips, to
which is added the (ludicrously low and insulting minimum allowable in all but
7 states) $ 2.13, for even in those states, an average $17.13 hourly wage for unskilled labor. In the seven states
requiring higher minimums for wait staff it comes to over $22 hourly! In truth, many make significantly more,
depending on where they work.
So, recapping:
Tipping wasn’t a
Southern invention but was centuries old when Americans travelling overseas
were exposed to it.
Most freed slaves
were not equipped to work in areas of employment where tipping was the norm.
Tipping was far more
prevalent in the North.
Most workers earning tips today are not minorities, but many
are female. Most make more with tips than a minimum wage would provide. Yes,
tipping does allow employers to pay less, but that “extra” cost is borne by the
customer
Finally, tipping, although common and much more generous in
other areas of personal service (massage therapists, hairdressers, etc.), is
primarily associated with low skill, minimum or zero training jobs, which would
in any case be minimum wage jobs.
Does that suck?
Perhaps, but in a nation with free public schooling and vocational programs
there are other opportunities. The choice to avail or not to avail oneself of
said opportunities is personal.
Overstating the
impact of race in areas where the validity of such attribution is questionable,
at best, dilutes the cause of racial justice and equality in those areas where
there is legitimate and pressing concern. Automatically injecting an allegation of “racism”
into areas where other factors may well be in play weakens, rather than
strengthens the moral stance of those opposing racial bias and discrimination
in America. Faulty “history” is no excuse for “Fake News,” even in a righteous
cause.
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