Llewellyn Rockwell’s piece on Denny’s restaurants (Cultural Revolutions, December 1994) was a first-rate statement that cut through the fog of news reporting on the controversy. Let me add a strange footnote to this craziness.

On the evening of December 30, my wife and I went to a Denny’s. There we found a perfectly natural and calm interaction between black and white patrons and workers—until a group of black teenagers, who had eaten their fill, got up and left without paying. The waitress ran out into the cold night air and rightfully demanded payment. Needless to say, she was mocked for doing so and told that no one in their crowd had ordered the food, and that the person who had ordered left early. Hence they felt no compunction to pay!

Amid the Clockwork Orange mocking and jeering of the waitress, it seemed to have been lost on all concerned that she had to make good the invoice for these “boyz in the hood.” So in this rush to victimology of which you speak, the real victim here was a working-class waitress, and the real villains were the teenage blacks.

One wonders if the final outcome of these deviant acts in the name of political correctness will be nothing less than the shutdown of a 24-hour restaurant where black and white patrons can actually enjoy each other’s company.

        —Irving Louis Horowitz
Rutgers University Department of Sociology
New Brunswick, NJ