Yelp, the company that specializes in crowd-sourced business reviews, announced Thursday that it will now warn users about businesses that have been accused of “overt” racism. Conservatives responded to this news with sighs of relief knowing that the “minorities” whose wellbeing they’re always concerned about will be appropriately alerted to bigoted business owners whose toxic practices put in jeopardy their dignity and sense of safety.
Nah, I’m bullshittin’. White people got big mad.
“Now, when a business gains attention for reports of racist conduct, Yelp will place a new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert on their Yelp page to inform users, along with a link to a news article where they can learn more,” the company tweeted.
“Communities have always turned to Yelp in reaction to current events at the local level,” Noorie Malik, Yelp’s vice president of user operations wrote on the company’s blog. “As the nation reckons with issues of systemic racism, we’ve seen in the last few months that there is a clear need to warn consumers about businesses associated with egregious, racially-charged actions to help people make more informed spending decisions.”
Let’s be real about something: Up until now, Yelp has existed as a godsend for all the complain-y Karens and Donalds of the world to air out the pettiest of grievances with no regard to how that behavior might affect the business they’re reviewing. (Side note: I decided on “Donald” because Trump is pretty much the epitome of what a male Karen is—he’s racist, entitled, cowardly, a compulsive liar and someone who wields power irresponsibly while pretending to be persecuted.)
Yet people who probably voted for the current commander-in-orangey-shit-stains whose rhetoric puts people of color at risk every day got all in their feelings over Yelp’s bootleg version of the Green Book and they turned Twitter into a hit-dog-hollering parade.
Just for fun, let’s start with non-white political commentator and conservative sock-puppet Michelle Malkin who posted a whole doomsday video imploring people to “cancel Yelp” and said that the company’s new policy is going to “blow up in their faces like one of those improvised explosive devices of Antifa.”
So Malkin is spreading Antifa propaganda when she could have just as easily pointed to the group of right-wing terrorists who allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. That group, much like white supremacist organizations all over the nation, actually had home-made explosives, according to the FBI. (The same FBI that has said repeatedly that antifa isn’t an actual organization.) Malkin can reimagine all of that right-winger nonsense as truisms but she can’t envision that people of color might benefit from an alert that tells them which establishments to steer clear of.
Then there’s California congressional candidate Beatrice Cardenas who tweeted that racism “is such a subjective accusation to make against someone” and that Yelp is “going to be personally responsible for many lives destroyed when this new feature gets abused and weaponized, and people lose their businesses.”
OK, calm down Karens-for-Congress. First of all, it’s mostly white people who think racism is subjective which is an easy position to take when your pasty ass doesn’t experience it. Secondly, all reviews are subjective and they all have the potential to cost people business. It’s very telling that white people draw the line at accusations of racism when it comes to having free rein to criticize businesses in a way that might be harmful to them. But let a restaurant put too much spice on their quiche with raisins or whatever the fuck it is white people eat.
The hurri-Karen flood of white tears didn’t stop there. It seems some white people believe Yelp’s new policy will be weaponized against good white people who would never, ever do the racisms.
I guess, “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” only applies to Black people who don’t trust cops or the Karens who call them over bullshit.
Then there are those who can’t imagine a use for a racism-warning alert and chose to express that sentiment by...being racist as fuck. Media analyst Mark Dice appears to think racism is a figment of the negro imagination.
“So when a customer hallucinates that they’ve experienced racism you’re going to alert the entire world that the restaurant is racist?” Dice asked.
Here’s Blaze TV host Lauren Chen who thinks affirmative action and critical race theory are racist—not the white-centric socioeconomic conditions that make those things necessary—but can’t imagine patrons of color wanting to stay the fuck away from business owners who think exactly like her.
At the end of the day, I’m not sure how effective Yelp’s new policy will be, but I know white people and conservatives appear to be afraid. It’s almost as if they’re worried about being profiled or unfairly judged based on optics and subsequently discriminated against.
I can’t relate.