Taco Bell Employee Fired for Using Racial Slur

The Daily Pennsylvania reports that a Taco Bell employee who described an Asian American customer on a sales receipt as “Steve Chink” has been fired.

The incident went viral and attracted lots of media attention from AsAmNews and other outlets after In Young Lee posted about what happened to him on Facebook.

“We do not tolerate this behavior,” Taco Bell said in a statement. “This employee no longer works for the brand, and the franchisee is retraining its staff to ensure this incident will not happen again. Management has reached out and apologized directly to the customer.”

Lee, who is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, had stated on Facebook he did not want the employee fired. He has not commented further on Facebook about the incident since the dismissal.

The Asian Pacific Student Coalition at U of Penn told the Daily Pennsylvania the action by the fast food outlet was a good first step, but it says more needs to be done.

It called for a larger dialogue, saying the manager didn’t deal with the situation very effectively.

Lee in his Facebook post said the manager apologized, but then went on to blame him for snatching the food from the cashier after confronting him about the receipt.

“It was as if he was trying to defuse the situation by redirecting the blame on to me,” Lee wrote. “But how does he expect me to be polite to the cashier when he deliberately took his time to spell out the word “CHINK” to describe me?”
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