At a Chinatown restaurant we go to for lunch, there is a “lunch menu” and a “dinner menu.” Whenever a Chinese person comes in, he or she is automatically given the lunch menu. When a non-Chinese person comes in, he or she is usually given the dinner menu. The dinner menu is considerably more expensive and does not have the low-cost luncheon choices. We know this, and so we always ask for the lunch menu, which they bring without a problem. However, a majority of other non-Chinese (usually foreign tourists) who come in do not know about the lunch menu and spend more than they need to. I am always tempted to tell them to ask for the lunch menu. Would that be an ethically sound decision? Or should I just butt out?

Dr. Stephen Feld, New York

In the scenario you describe, the restaurant’s Chinese staff members are partial to their Chinese neighbors. They give them special treatment. They don’t have anything against non-Chinese, as they show by happily giving you the lunch menu when you ask for it. So they’re motivated by in-group preference, not by out-group hostility.

Some people think that giving preferential treatment to members of your own ethnic kind is as bad as hostility to outsiders. Others even deny that such a distinction can be drawn. I think that’s wrong. In my experience, African-Americans, especially in small towns, often smile and nod at black passers-by and not at white ones. You can have that as a reflex without ever glowering at a white person or refusing to smile back if a person who isn’t black smiles at you. Partiality needn’t be prejudicial.

Granted, we’d feel very different about white servers favoring white customers. But that’s for two reasons. One is a suspicion that, in our society, behavior of that sort would in fact be motivated by negative feelings toward nonwhites — that is, by racism. Another is that whites are a majority in this country. Partiality to your own kind, for minorities, is to some degree a response to the sense that you need to stick together against majority prejudices. White people in America seldom have a reason to respond that way.