Fired Chipotle manager offered job back after being wrongfully accused of racism

Chipotle has offered to rehire a manager in St. Paul, Minnesota, three days after bowing to social media pressure and terminating the employee over internet-fueled accusations of racism. Spoiler alert: the internet was wrong.

Dominique Moran was fired by the Mexican food chain after refusing service to a group of black men, whom she claimed had a history of not paying for meals. One of the taco-deprived customers, Masud Ali, posted a video of the altercation on Twitter, accusing the Chipotle manager of racism.

The video went viral, and on Friday Chipotle canned Moran, explaining that, “This is not how we treat our customers and as a result, the manager has been terminated and the restaurant is being retrained to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.”

But the decision to appease the outraged masses appears to have been a smidgeon premature: Before playing the racism card, Ali had openly boasted on Twitter about “dining and dashing” – the ancient art of not paying for meals.

In one tweet he even hinted that he would assault anyone who tried to stop him from poaching food without paying for it.

Needless to say, many social justice warriors looked very silly after it was revealed that Ali was in fact a serial dine-and-dasher.

Originally billed as a textbook case of racism gripping American in the age of Trump, the internet quickly changed its tune about the now-infamous video, from outrage to …. Outrage. A petition was quickly set up to demand that Moran be given her old job back, and a GoFundMe aimed at providing the wrongfully-terminated woman with a small financial parachute has raised more than $9,500 in two days.

In light of the new evidence – which some have claimed the company knew about from the very beginning – Chipotle has now offered to rehire Moran, even going so far as to “apologize to our manager for being put in this position.”

It’s not clear if Moran will take the job, but she has thanked her supporters on social media for their “kind words, positive vibes, prayers and warm thoughts.”

Hastily produced – and occasionally false accusations of racism actually hurt the fight against it, political and social commentator Anthony Brian Logan believes, suggesting that the frequency of viral videos intended to shame seemingly racist behavior are leading to a “boy who cried wolf” situation.

“When you keep having these episodes to come up, people don’t really know if it’s a real case of racism, an allegation, an overreaction – nobody really knows,” Logan told RT. “So racism itself becomes less important, therefore things can just happen and nobody really cares.”

The Chipotle incident is a valuable lesson to the people who are too eager to jump to conclusions and make racism accusations without fully understanding the situation first, Logan believes.

“Sometime you should just think for a moment for you to say something about someone they may or may not be true. Get some evidence first,” he added.

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