Earlier today Oakland minister Byron Williams wrote an article about racism and rankism for Huffington Post. The article describes how a manager of a Jacksonville, Florida, restaurant saw Reverend Williams as an opportunity to impose his will over another human being, and this led to the manager’s demand that Williams remove his hat.

Reverend Williams observed the manager’s maneuver might have had as much to do with rank as with race. The manager sized up Williams at a glance and relegated him to an inferior rank, someone to be ordered around rather than served as a valued customer. No matter how much effort we put into educating each other about racism, there will never be a way to judge how much race factors into mundane little power plays like this. However, if we critique the blatant rankism of the incident, perhaps we can curb some of the racism as well.

I wanted to leave a comment on the article, but unfortunately comments were locked by the time I got there. A couple of the early commenters, who seem to have been reacting to the article without really reading it, pointed out that it’s standard courtesy to remove your hat in the South. I find this to be a relic of rankism. The Bible uses covering the head as a sign of submission (particularly for women), so making demands about what people can or cannot wear on their heads hearkens back to the Biblical framework for subjugation to authority. This implication could hardly be lost on Reverend Williams. Moreover, insisting that people remove their hats indoors might stigmatize people who have good personal reasons for wearing their hat (such as wishing to avoid calling attention to cancer). In his article, Reverend Williams imparts one of those little human stories with big implications for the human condition. I’m glad he chose to share it.