Even though their founder and CEO was casually throwing out the slur on a call he had with his marketing agency about the PR fallout of his previous comments complaining about NFL players exercising their right to protest police brutality during the national anthem, the official position of Papa Johns is that they condemn racism in all forms and they want to distance themselves from the endorsements and praise the restaurant has received from white supremacists both before and after the slur came to light.
The claim trying to be argued here was the he hated black people and your additional sources still do not back that up. The second article seems to instead provide evidence against that claim. In reality this event happened during peak wokenness where saying a slur no matter the context made you a bad person deserving of being cancelled.
Did we read the same source? The closest thing I saw in there to anything he said was:
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
Which, for the record, has never been documented at all. Conversely, his black chauffeur insisted (post-mortem) that his former employer was always respectful, and the only time he even mentioned race was to ask what 'you people want to be called.'
The conversation was pretty non-exciting: 'What people?' 'Um, colored folk.' 'We prefer to be called black.' 'Oh, okay...' End of chat.
Someone seeking out the most respectful language to use - the opposite of bigotry.
He doesn't. I think you misread this passage (it's the only thing that comes close):
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
It's worth pointing out that there's no evidence that Colonel Sanders ever did that. It's not as if he was directly quoting someone. Even if he really wanted to bitch about how unfair it is that someone else was able to be racist without being called out for it, he could have phrased that in any number of other ways. Schnatter was just spewing bullshit and threw out that slur without any reason for doing so.