A McDonald's Security Executive Is Suing The Company For Racial Discrimination

In April of 2021, McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski sent a text message to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot that landed the fast-food executive in a less-than-flattering spotlight. Seven-year-old Jaslyn Adams, who was Black, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo, who was Latino, had recently been killed in the city as a result of gun violence. The former was shot while sitting in a car in a McDonald's parking lot and the latter was killed by a police offer, NPR reports. 

Per an anonymous public information request that revealed the correspondence, Kempczinski appeared to blame both deaths on the children's parents. "The parents failed those kids which I know is something you can't say," he wrote in the text. "Even harder to fix." Upon widespread backlash regarding his comments, Kempczinski issued a public apology to McDonald's employees in which he acknowledged that the victims' families "[face] a very different reality" than he does, per NPR. "Not taking the time to think about this from their viewpoint was wrong," he added. Even so, Kempczinski continued to face criticism from racial justice activists for his remarks. 

One of those activists was Michael Peaster, a Black McDonald's security executive who, at the time, had worked at the company for more than three decades. Now, Peaster is suing the chain and its CEO for racial discrimination, Insider reports.

Michael Peaster headed up McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski's personal security team for 35 years. Despite his tenure as the vice president of global safety, security, and intelligence, the chain fired Peaster in November for "performing his job poorly," relays Insider. But Peaster is claiming that the chain and its CEO treated him poorly "for the better part of a year," starting when Peaster spoke out against Kempczinski's controversial text messages to Mayor Lightfoot at a McDonald's town hall.

Peaster believes that his criticism of Kempczinski's text messages was the impetus of his termination and is suing Kempczinski and the company for racial discrimination. Per the lawsuit, cited by Insider, Peaster expressed at the town hall that Kempczinski was "in denial as to why many people believed his texts were racist." Peaster added that "we cannot broad brush the violence issues in Chicago to make it appear that all parents who have children who are victims to gun violence are bad parents." 

Per the suit, Peaster felt that his employers treated him like an "invisible officer" following his comments at the town hall. According to Peaster, Kempczinski refused meetings and banned him from flying on the company's private jet. The suit claims that the firing, which will take effect on December 31, was "retaliatory against Michael Peaster based on his respectful but legitimate contradiction of Kempczinski on the subject of race."