A black Oxford student who refused to tip a waitress because she was white has said he has no regrets for his actions.
Ntokozo Qwabe – a Rhodes scholar from South Africa and leader of the campaign to remove a Cecil Rhodes statue at Oxford – who bragged online about having upset a white South Afrcian waitress, Ashleigh Schultz, by demanding the return of land to black people said he doesn’t rue anything because he was helping to ‘disrupt whiteness’.
Postgraduate student Qwabe reduced 24-year-old Schultz to tears when he and a friend visited a restaurant in Cape Town and wrote on their cafe bill – “We will give tip when you return the land.”
Qwabe was heavily criticised after bragging he had made Schulz “cry white girl tears”. The two were widely condemned on social media, with Qwabe described as a “racist bully”.
Qwabe told the Daily Vox he was proud to “disrupt whiteness”.
He said: “The act was not directed at Ashleigh, the waitress. Quite frankly, her feelings are irrelevant to us. The manager came to our table and made a scene; this is what we call white tears. They’re not literal tears – no one cried. These innocent white girl tears re-entrenches patriarchy because white women’s tears make white men want to jump in and save white women from all these aggressive black people.”
After the incident, he gloated on Facebook that he was “unable to stop smiling because something so black and wonderful had happened”.
