It was a suffocatingly hot July afternoon in Bryan, Texas, and inside a chain restaurant on the North Earl Rudder Freeway, it wasn’t much cooler. An angular African-American waiter in his mid-20s slogged through his four-hour shift, his eyes bloodshot, his face drawn. On top of his $2.13 hourly wage he would earn barely $15 in tips. As dreary as his day was, it was made much worse by an innocent question from one of his customers.
