“I am not good at math,” I say, pulling out my iPhone and navigating to the calculator app. I actually excelled in every math class I have ever taken, but I don’t mean to lie. I mean that I have never felt good enough at it, especially when it comes to tipping.

I use my phone to calculate 20% of my friend’s overpriced meal at this nondescript Long Island diner. She pulls the amount from her purse in cash and leaves it on the table. We continue talking as the waitress grabs the crumpled bills off the table. We laugh at how we are the only Black people we have seen so far on our trip to the Fire Island Pines, doing that thing Black people do where we conjure humor out of our racial anxieties because of all the times we’ve been shouted down when we ask for them to be taken seriously.

“Was there something wrong with your meal?!” our waitress shrieks as she storms back to our table, interrupting our laughter and waving my friend’s tip indignantly in the air like it’s a protest sign at a rally.

“No…,” my friend replies warily.

“Then why so little?” the waitress spits, the reddening white faces surrounding us becoming a gang of strobe lights as they spin toward the commotion. I pull my phone back out to confirm the number, beating myself up about a mistake I did not make. The waitress just sucks her teeth, turns on her heel, and huffs away before we can respond.

I figure out later that my friend’s colleague, who had eaten at the same table and asked for a separate check, hadn’t yet left his tip. The waitress probably assumed my friend was tipping for both of them, and that the 10% of their total left by her was so unacceptable that we deserved to be publicly yelled at about it.

That premature assumption and aggression didn't happen in a vacuum. Black people are routinely subject to accusations of poor tipping and bad behavior in stores and restaurants, which leads to service laced with skepticism and violence, or service not given at all.

At the same time, many of us grew up in families that did not have enough money to dine out and did not learn tipping etiquette until much later in life, if ever.

This anti-Black aggression, coupled with structural barriers around becoming versed in middle-class service luxuries, complicates the idea that everyone who does not tip enough is no more than a horrible person who should be shamed and criminalized. It’s an idea so universally understood as righteous that I have internalized it, despite experiencing its damage firsthand. It’s an idea that not only empowered the threatening actions of that waitress but also has historically led to far worse consequences for Black people perceived as being poor customers.

But the problem has never been that Black people are not good customers. The problem is the systems that uphold anti-Black and anti-labor service standards in the first place.

It’s no surprise that studies show tipping encourages anti-Blackness in service industries. Just like racism, the practice of forcing workers to rely on the whims of customers rather than paying them a living wage up front is rooted in the exploitation of vulnerable people. In most states, servers, bartenders, and other workers who receive tips don’t have to be paid minimum wage. Restaurants and shops are allowed to pay these workers — many of whom are Black themselves — less because most of their income comes from tips. Usually, those tips are shared among the staff, meaning there is always collateral damage done against others in need if you withhold tips, no matter how justifiable the reason.

Tipping is rooted in companies treating those without means like animals, and Black people are structurally denied means through job discrimination, racist housing policy, imprisonment, and other ways of exploiting labor that evolved from slavery. And in a capitalist system rooted in the enslavement of Africans, to be anti-labor is always to be anti-Black.