The CEO of McDonald’s is under fire over a text message he sent to the Chicago mayor placing onus on the parents of two children killed in shootings in the city.
McDonald’s employees and community groups have expressed outrage at CEO Chris Kempczinski after a Freedom of Information Act request filed by an activist revealed a text he sent to Mayor Lori Lightfoot in April after a meeting at McDonald’s Chicago headquarters.
“P.s. tragic shootings in last week, both at our restaurant yesterday and with Adam Toldeo [sic]. With both, the parents failed those kids which I know is something you can’t say. Even harder to fix,” Kempczinski wrote on April 19, the day after 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams was fatally shot by a gunman while sitting with her father in a car in a McDonald’s drive-thru.
Three weeks earlier, a 13-year-old boy, Adam Toledo, was shot and killed by Chicago police. Video footage showed the boy had both hands raised when he was shot.
A dozen groups, including the Chicago Fight for $15 and a Union, Little Village Community Council and Centro Sin Fronteras, said that the text drew attention to larger issues and that they planned to protest at McDonald’s headquarters Wednesday.
The groups called his comments “ignorant, racist and unacceptable coming from anyone, let alone the CEO of McDonald’s, a company that spends big to market to communities of color and purports to stand with Black lives” in an open letter they plan to send Wednesday, the Chicago Tribune reported.
McDonald’s employee Adriana Sanchez told WBEZ Chicago she that was angered by the comments and that Kempczinski was “putting the blame on parents for the violence in the streets.”
“He can’t relate because he is wealthy and we are not, and he doesn’t understand our struggle,” she said.
Kempczinski addressed the controversy Tuesday in an email to employees, saying his remarks lacked the “compassion and empathy I feel for these families.”
“It is on all of us to do better for the children of our communities. I am committed to working with civic leaders and elected officials to understand what that means for McDonald’s, and I will be asking all of you to join me in this pursuit,” he wrote, according to the Tribune.
The signatories of the letter called on Kempczinski to meet with employees and community leaders to share how he plans to tackle systemic racism at McDonald’s and beyond.
McDonald’s has a long history of racial discrimination allegations. Black franchisees have accused the company of confining them to less profitable restaurants in minority communities while not offering them financial support given to white owners. Last year, more than four dozen Black former franchisees filed a federal lawsuit against the company accusing it of systemic racial discrimination.