As a restaurant operator, you might think you’re covered when it comes to harassment liability. You’ve conducted training, and employees understand that sexual or racial harassment won’t be tolerated. But what about race-on-race harassment?

Columnist Jemele Hill, of ESPN.com and The Jim Rome Show, recently wrote about race-on-race harassment following a deposition where New York Knicks head coach Isiah Thomas said it would bother him more if a white man called a black woman a curse word than if a black man did the same thing.

Hill was courageous enough to spotlight Thomas for his double-standard, but typically race-on-race harassment goes undetected. The restaurant industry, with its hectic schedules and high turnover, is ripe for this type of abuse.

Why it happens?

Gerry Fernandez, president of the Multicultural Foodservice and Hospitality Alliance (MFHA), says there’s “no doubt race-on-race harassment happens,” but admits it’s largely unreported. “Some operators don’t know and really some don’t care,” he says, noting many think it’s OK to turn a blind eye and let employees “fight it out.”

But he warns operators to take a different approach.

Certainly, the vulnerability to lawsuits is one thing to consider, but other outcomes from race-on-race harassment include workplace disruptions and even violence. Fernandez recalls dealing recently with race-on-race harassment in a hotel kitchen. Hispanic workers—Puerto Ricans and Dominicans—were fighting over a slur, and one man went to his locker and retrieved a handgun.

“These are the kinds of things that can happen, so I think it’s important to be proactive on understanding where there are potential developing tensions between ethnic and racial groups so you can recognize it,” Fernandez says, adding that conflict within the same ethnic and racial groups is nothing new, although a more diverse workplace is now bringing same-race groups together that have typically kept their distance.

“Now because so much of our workforce in franchise operations and foodservice … are minority and multicultural, this is going to naturally occur,” Fernandez says.

Carmen Van Kerckhove, co-founder of New Demographic, a company that facilitates conversations about race in the workplace and at seminars, says another reason race-on-race harassment occurs is that “it’s a reaction against negative stereotypes of your own race.” This twisted logic dictates that if an employee separates himself from his own race—by disdaining it or criticizing it—he will prevent himself from being judged according to those stereotypes.

Van Kerckhove says some instigators might also see race-on-race harassment as a way to politically advance themselves in the company, but that racial discrimination—even if it’s inadvertent—has to be present initially.

“That could happen in a workplace where there already is racial discrimination,” Van Kerckhove says. “One group isn’t advancing where others are. In a case like that, even if they don’t believe anyone is inferior, they may treat others that way to advance their own cause.”