That time Chick-fil-A tweeted "your community" and people lost their minds

AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File

All this hullabaloo was over spicy chicken nuggets. We live in crazy times. If you heard that a Chick-fil-A customer enjoyed his “grilled spicy deluxe” but lamented that there is no offering on the menu for spicy nuggets on Twitter, would you think that tweet would develop into something that set off the perpetually outraged on social media? Of course, this is 2022 and everyone is wound tight.

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A Chick-fil-A customer named Don, according to his Twitter account, posted a tweet and Chick-fil-A responded, as an attentive company does. The problem came in the wording of the response. It was an innocent remark but if someone is hellbent to find racism in everything, then a claim of racism is bound to follow. Don just wants some spicy nuggets.

The social media backlash began last Friday after one user tweeted the message “grilled spicy deluxe but still noooo spicy nuggets” to the fast-food giant’s official account.

“Your community will be the first to know if spicy items are added to the permanent menu, Don!” Chick-fil-A’s account responded.

Don doesn’t sound like a jerk, does he? I read his tweet as a good-natured attempt to nudge Chick-fil-A to spice up some nuggets and sell them on the menu. Chick-fil-A sounds amiable in its response. We’ll let your community know as soon as they are, the company was saying. The catch is the use of “your community.” Apparently that is a racist comment. You can’t make this stuff up.

While the initial tweet had only six replies, Chick-fil-A’s response got more than 700 replies and 4,300 quote tweets because of its choice of wording. Many Twitter users called out the account’s decision to use the term “your community,” questioning whether it was targeting the identity of the user, who appears to be Black.

“What do you mean by ‘your community’???????” a tweet read.

Another user wrote: “Your community? I’m gonna need explanation for that comment. ‘Our’ community wouldn’t wanna think that there was some racial undertones behind that.”

“Chic…this aint a good look. What you meant by that specifically?” a user questioned in a tweet.

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Interestingly enough, the first two tweets mentioned above were deleted. Maybe those people realized they were making something out of nothing.

Some people responded that this is a frequent response by Chick-fil-A and not some nefarious racist expression. It literally means serving the desired product at a store near the customer – his community.

I’m happy to say that, after scrolling through Chick-fil-A’s Twitter account, I do not find a hand-wringing apology. The company doesn’t owe anyone an apology. You notice that Don, the guy who posted the original tweet wasn’t offended. It was the people who responded. None of this shows up on the official account. Chick-fil-A did comment to the TODAY show.

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

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No apology. They just commented on a poor choice of words, which I also think they did not need to do, but that’s its corporate decision. The constant looking for reasons to scream racism is tedious and dilutes real cases of racism. If everything is racist, then nothing is racist.

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