Facebook Publication Date: 4/15/2018 21:04

Hey Starbucks! Part 1

First installment of a series on the debacle that was Starbucks

Lace on Race was informed that not everyone was able to access the article through Medium. We are re-posting it here.
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Well, I can’t stop thinking about it. Nor can most of my friends and colleagues in both the writing and the activism circles in which I engage.

We all talked about the outrage. We all talked about the unnaturally yet unsurprisingly calm men, for whom it seemed being arrested for doing absolutely nothing wrong was just all in a day’s work; like it was just part of the cost of ‘doing the business’ of being black in America (it is).

We all talked about the feeling, reinforced time and again, that there are no truly safe places for us.

We all talked about the white people, some of which no doubt consider themselves ‘ride or die’ when it comes to racial justice issues, who stood there and watched, or ran off, or turned away, or, if they were really feeling themselves, recorded it so they would have something to remind them of the horror when they wrote their strongly worded letter to some nebulous ‘person in charge’.

The especially woke ones made themselves the heroes of the story, telling anybody with a microphone or a steno pad just how awful it was, making sure they threw in all the lingo they have learned in these last months of their watching and reading and witnessing the collective grunt of black and brown people forcibly and irrevocably pulling back the curtain of everyday racism in America.

A curtain, and a fetid scene on constant loop, of what it really means to be black in this country. A curtain, stained with the blood of our foremothers and fathers then, and of our contemporaries now. A rigid curtain, not easily moved, because of the weight of the heels of every white person in this nation, who will do anything to keep the curtain closed, even as they deny its very existence at all; even as their measured voices and soothing hand puppets insist that they want nothing more than a fully open and unfiltered gaze/glare/gleaning of the unvarnished American story.

The clutched pearls, the furrowed brows, the Kabuki dance of minimization, whitesplaining, rationalization that is part of the Wipipo playbook — the leather bound manual and ticket punch of everyone whose ancestors colluded with an unholy system to gain the privilege and the covering often denied them before the Great Bleaching that was Ellis Island.

But I digress. This is not about, not solely about, the history of whiteness. That is a necessary conversation for another day.

No.

Rather, this is a story that has multiple themes, the (all too often deserved) trope of the Weaponized White Woman; the simultaneously painful and familiar reminder that overseers’ — I’m sorry I meant police’s — collusion with entrenched structure and power and oppression of us is a feature, not a bug, of the law enforcement that started as slave patrols; a story where our never-quite-full-on humanity was once again questioned, scrutinized, and once again was deemed lacking; the scars of the paralyzed and mute white people as they watched , in league with a system they say they decry, that were and are deemed more noteworthy and sympathetic than those men whose scars are etched every bit as deeply in their souls and their psyches as those scars, bone deep welts really, that were raised on the backs of my foremothers and forefathers on plantations in South Carolina and Virginia and Tennessee and Arkansas.

That America’s tear ducts only seem to open at the sight of alabaster pain is not new. Nor it is noteworthy.

What is worth mentioning is something that has not been mentioned yet, not that I can see or read in the days following the gross injustice.

What is worth noticing and mentioning is that this all happened under the watch of a company that prides itself as being not just a company, but an actual force for good; a catalyst for change.

What is worth noticing and mentioning is that one can be in be in the employ of this catalyst; can have all the requisite diversity/Ebony&Ivory/Burning Man trainings; can have tats and piercings and mermaid hair and an Obama sticker and a green apron and Norah Jones playing in the background and still retreat to the arms of the state at a twinge of discomfort — and know that the state will protect and cover them, ink and septum ring and all.

What is worth noticing and mentioning is that there is a big chance that our intrepid, weaponized barista with the fragrance of coffee that brown people picked with backs that no longer fully straighten, was once instructed, not too long ago (2015) by our Company, our Force For Change, our Catalyst For Good, to write messages of racial harmony on cups and engage in dialog about race with customers with the same alacrity, nimbleness, and competence that she has when she delineates the difference between an French Press and an Americano.

This is a true, but almost completely forgotten part of Starbucks’ recent history. Three years ago, in a heavily touted move that lasted only slightly longer than my acrid Starbucks coffee breath, the company that did then, and still does now redline; refusing to open stores in areas with people as brown as their beans (The only way to get in black areas in San Diego was for Magic Johnson to franchise a few of them; the back door stepchildren of the Mermaid) decided that it would be a good idea to serve up racial dialog between its baristas and customers in an ill fated initiative called Race Together.

What is worth noticing and mentioning is that a company who I assume believes its own press releases could not, or more accurately did not, screen for the very attributes it was publicly and loudly decrying not three years ago.

Welp.

Maybe the sight of black men being lead away through stores, navigating through the maze of branded cups and overpriced organic snacks and alt-Musak music will actually be the impetus to have an actual substantive conversation, and not only by a barista whose convictions may or may not mirror the stated values and mission of Starbucks, not only by an employee who couldn’t even tell you at gunpoint what those stated goals and values even were, but at the top, where the company does the real internal work, sees the lack of congruence between its public corporate persona and how these stated convictions are jettisoned at the slightest twinge of discomfort by a white woman in a green apron.

Maybe they can give an apology that wasn’t vetted by a team of attorneys. Maybe they will have the candor and self reflective awareness that they tried to push on its line staff and customers.

This happened because not because Starbucks is exceptionally bad. This happened because Starbucks had the hubris and the arrogance to consider itself exceptionally good, so it felt that no work was necessary.

Starbucks gets the externals (almost) right; offering up a standardized, sanitized version of a coffeehouse with secondhand sofas, stained concrete floors, and mismatched cups, making up its own lingo (Venti, anyone?), making the chairs just uncomfortable enough so no one stays too long or thinks too much about what they are consuming —which goes for the coffee drink, the thinly sliced lemon bars, or the antiseptic vibe of the almost authentically hip.

Much like what is more and more passing for racial justice work these days. Getting the lingo right; the standardized and commodified ambiance down pat, we all often care more about what the cup looks like than we do what we are pouring out into the minds of those we would influence.

Again. Starbucks is not the only problem here.

This three year delayed conversation needs to happen. Not just as a bleary eyed barista hands you your Frap, but within ourselves. In our own workplaces. In boardrooms.

But it needs to happen within the context of messy incidents where scars that can’t be covered with whipped cream reside. It needs to happen in a world where we acknowledge that we all created the conditions for that encounter. It needs to happen when we recognize just how Emmett Till died; how the barometer of a white woman’s feeling state can tip the scales towards our survival or our demise.

So Starbucks. Let’s talk. For real this time.

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