Chick-fil-A backs off racial gaffe after social media storm

Restaurant chain Chick-fil-A learned the hard way when a tweet about its newly reintroduced spicy chicken sandwich sparked discussion hotter than the sauce.

After a Twitter user and Chick-fil-A nuggets fan decried the lack of spicy nuggets on the menu, noting that its grilled spicy deluxe chicken sandwich had returned, the company sought to reassure its customer.

“Your community will be the first to know if spicy items are added to the permanent menu, Don!” the company tweeted back directly to the poster.

What the people who craft Chick-fil-A’s messaging apparently did not know was that using the term “your community” in that way can come across as a veiled racial slur.

The replies came flooding in — more than 700 of them — many of them calling the company out.

“Your community? I’m gonna need explanation for that comment,” one tweet read, according to NBC News. ” ‘Our’ community wouldn’t wanna think that there was some racial undertones behind that.”

Many others were quick to point out that Chick-fil-A uses that phrase all the time, backing that up with screen shots.

The online kerfuffle had the restaurant chain admitting some level of culpability. It also explained that it uses the phrase all the time and it refers solely to geography and restaurant service areas.

“The response was a poor choice of words but was not intended in any way to be insensitive or disrespectful,” a spokesperson told NBC News. “We often use the term ‘community’ in a broader sense to talk about places where we operate restaurants and serve the surrounding community.”

The groundwork for that interpretation had perhaps already been laid. It was just two years ago, during the height of the national protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody, that then-CEO Dan Cathy interrupted a roundtable discussion about racism to whip out a brush and shine the sneakers of hip-hop artist and participant Lecrae.

The 69-year-old exec stepped down in September 2021 and handed the reins to son Andrew Truett Cathy, though the elder Cathy remained chairman of the board.