Originally Posted by
Tizzette
Before assuming racism, consider that it is so extreme to cancel the next night's reservations and ban OP from any of the owner's hotels that one has to wonder if there's more to it. He made a complaint about ants. They did spray for ants right away, which did solve the immediate problem. He looked at this minor problem as an opportunity to get comped. If OP copped a mouthy adversarial, entitled attitude about it...well, nobody likes being talked down to, especially not an older woman GM by an 18 year old. So now the GM and the owner have a bad attitude toward OP over his complaint, and on top of that groups of young men renting multiple rooms has apparently meant they had to call the law for partying and drugs on previous occasions. Because a high percentage of the population in Cleveland, Mississippi is black, that kind of trouble would include young black men. Doesn't add up to racism.
Wow. Just as there is a possibility that the owner/operator were just innocently reacting to a bad OP attitude, there also is the possibility that the OP wasn't behaving badly at all and that this was racism. The OP's posts and behavior here, along with the fact that the owner/operator didn't stand behind the 100% brand guarantee and banned the OP without any evidence of wrongdoing, suggest the latter is far more likely than the former.
The fact that it is on record that this property has an endemic problem with ants further shores up the OP's position that he didn't do anything untoward. That further reinforces that a petulant and negligent owner/operator simply blamed the OP for their own incompetence--and did so because they were racist. Your dismissal of that as being solved by ant spray is rather hilarious...and sad. The OP deserves a room without ants...and without the smell of ant spray. The OP deserves 100% satisfaction as per the brand guarantee. The ant problem clearly precluded that. Being banned from this hotel and other nearby hotels doesn't suggest 100% satisfaction, either. You want to ignore that completely...because you don't want to or cannot fathom the possibility of racism.
Your final dismissal that it just "doesn't add up to racism" at all is the first hint that you only consider the first possibility of OP attitude and ignore even the possibility of racism. That is called entitlement.
The fact that you bring up that Cleveland, MS has a large black population is the very definition of prejudice. Just because there are lots of black men there doesn't have a thing to do with our OP--except that he also is black. That is racism.
You suggest that the owner/operator might have responded to the black OP because there are problems faced from other black men; that possible response would be racist. Blaming one person for the problems from other people of the same skin color/identity group is racist/bigoted. No one (white) makes the same claim about white people--which is what white entitlement is about and how you know this situation likes involves racism. No wonder you cannot imagine that racism is just as much a possibility here.