Whatever you make of Italian salamis and David Foster Wallace, we should all be able to agree on one point: “lower-class” ≠ “Mexican.” In a Tuesday column for the New York Times, commentator David Brooks earned the ire of the Internet masses by suggesting that the college-educated bourgeoisie are single-handedly ruining America. The entire column has proved controversial in some corners, but no piece more so than the lunch anecdote that appears toward the sixth-to-last paragraph.

Brooks recounts taking a friend with a high-school degree to an Italian sandwich shop, only to turn tail when he realized the shop’s “upper-middle-class … cultural signifiers” made her uncomfortable. Instead, Brooks says, he and his friend “ate Mexican.”