Employees at an Atlanta-area IKEA store are calling out management for arranging a Juneteenth menu that they are calling "racially insensitive." The menu reportedly included fried chicken and watermelon.
This is the first year that Juneteenth is observed as a federal holiday, being signed into action by President Joe Biden. As most corporations did, IKEA introduced a special menu for employees and customers to "honor and persevere Black Americans." According to employees at the store, the original menu included mac and cheese, collard greens, and other foods. "People actually wanted to quit, people weren’t coming back to work," they said about how upset staffers were about the racially insensitive choices.
A total of 33 people reportedly called off of work because of the menu, which caused the store's manager to send an internal email apologizing. Still, they went forward and served fried chicken and watermelon on Saturday.
"You cannot say serving watermelon on Juneteenth is a soul food menu when you don’t even know the history, they used to feed slaves watermelon during the slave time," said one employee.
The IKEA manager reportedly said that they did not work with their Black employees to create the menu.
In other unfortunate news surrounding Juneteenth, singer Jazmine Sullivan claims she had a racist encounter while shopping at Macy's this weekend. Read more about that here.