There are no Starbucks in the ghetto, so I have to assume the CEO of Starbucks hates black people. I suspect most of my neighbors would have a tough time spending ten bucks for a coffee and muffin, served up by a snotty lesbian with a face full of fishing tackle. Still, it is not hard to imagine how this would go in my neighborhood.
But the executive, who oversees a coffee empire with 4,700 U.S. stores, has now taken on arguably the most polarizing political debate in the United States: race relations.
Starbucks published a full page ad in the New York Times on Sunday — a stark, black, page with a tiny caption “Shall We Overcome?” in the middle, and the words “RaceTogether” with the company logo, on the bottom right. The ad, along with a similar one on Monday in USA Today, is part of an initiative launched this week by the coffee store chain to stimulate conversation and debate about the race in America by getting employees to engage with customers about the perennially hot button subject.
Beginning on Monday, Starbucks baristas will have the option as they serve customers to hand cups on which they’ve handwritten the words “Race Together” and start a discussion about race. This Friday, each copy of USA Today — which has a daily print circulation of almost 2 million and is a partner of Starbucks in this initiative — will have the first of a series of insert with information about race relations, including a variety of perspectives on race. Starbucks coffee shops will also stock the insert.
White plutocrats like the people running Starbucks can have “conversations about race”: because everyone they know is white and has the same opinions about race. Their conversation about race is more of a cheer than a conversation. I suppose that’s why they think this is a great idea.
In more vibrant neighborhoods like mine, there’s no need to have a conversation about race. Everyone knows the deal. We also know it is best be polite to one another in order to keep the peace. If the local coffee shop hires a bitter lesbian and has her lecture the customers about race, there will be blood.
If Starbucks wants to do something about race relations, how about they open some shops in my neighborhood. They’ll need to cut the prices and knock it off with the weird names for things, but maybe the shops in the rich white people towns can pay a little more for social justice.
That’s never going to happen, of course, because it would require some skin in the game. It’s much easier to stand on the lawn of the mansion or in the boardroom lecturing the rest of us from behind a line of security guards.
I know a number of progressives who hate Starbucks because it’s run by a Jew. Let the baristas get an earful of that talk about race.
“…a snotty lesbian with a face full of fishing tackle.” – See, now this is a fine example of the main reason I stop by here routinely. Great imagery.
I agree. I’m a writer and love good metaphors. This is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
“…a snotty lesbian with a face full of fishing tackle.”
How else would she catch a girlfriend?
Have you noticed that going to make a purchase at a ‘progressive’ business these days has become more and more like going to church? (Altogether, brothers and sisters…)
Yes, it is a stupid marketing stunt. Starbucks, however, is a whites-only company. The way to beat back this rage virus of anti-racism is ti change the terms. Uninfected people need to talk about the ethnic cleansing in liberal areas and the not-so-subtle racism of companies who cater to the infected.
I hate to say it, but I think we’d be wasting our time.
No doubt, but battling the enemy has its own rewards.
I agree, it’s a good way of keeping despair at bay. Thanks.
It is not wasting your time. My experience is that they are thunderstruck. I congratulate them on living black free and taking care that their kids do also because I know from experience how difficult that is, having failed at this myself.
The music (Marty Haugen aside, of course) is often better in church
What is this “Starbucks” of which you speak?
This is arrogance on an absurd level. It is the arrogance that the young and the ‘socially aware’ — who have never actually had much to do with anyone but their own insipid kind — not only want to detain a paying customer (and don’t we all hate capitalism that provides all these shitty jobs when we could all be working in the factory or swilling pigs out under the commissar’s glare, right?) to talk about something they have little experience of but even more so, that they have anything interesting to say on the matter. The only conversation one… Read more »
Starbucks isn’t lecturing us, it’s just using a marketing gimmick to make money.