Starbucks: “Black Lives Matter, but not enough to train this month.”

by philg

In writing “While Starbucks runs a re-education camp for employees, can we run a re-education camp for customers?” I left out the most interesting part.

The racist incident occurred in mid-April. The anti-racism training is scheduled for May 29. So the corporate message is the following:

  1. racism is bad
  2. at least some Starbucks employees are racists (but won’t be after they get training)
  3. we’ll continue to operate our racist enterprise in a racist manner for another 1.5 months

This doesn’t seem like a good theme for a press release!

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13 thoughts on “Starbucks: “Black Lives Matter, but not enough to train this month.””

  2. Bill: The Empire State Building was constructed in 13 months (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building ). In a country of 327 million people and in a human population where racism is not innate, but something only taught to some people (see https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/new-evidence-that-racism-isnt-natural/263785/ ), why should it take more than a few days to find some non-racists to explain how they think?

    You often promote resettlement of refugees in the U.S. I hope that you wouldn’t suggest that any of them are afflicted by racism after all of the “vetting” that they’ve been subjected to by U.S. government employees.

    Why not let recently arrived refugees come and do this training? http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/03/where-refugees-to-the-u-s-come-from/ says that 3 million refugees have been admitted to the U.S. since 1975. Roughly 35 percent of foreign-born Americans are not in the labor force, so that would suggest a pool of roughly 1 million refugees who don’t have to be at work somewhere else.

  3. Sigh. Really?

    It can take some time to develop a good training course. Its easy to say dont be racist. Probably even the manager in question knew that. But to create something that can effectively help you in possibly difficult or ambiguous situations can take some time and effort. I say good on them to take it seriously enough to spend a significant time on the training, and good on them for taking the time to maybe develop a good training and not just make a show of it.

    But I’m sure you knew that.

  4. Wally: Why would Starbucks have to develop its own anti-racism syllabus?

    Facebook already has one, for example (see https://hbr.org/2015/08/what-facebooks-anti-bias-training-program-gets-right ) and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook was on the Board of Starbucks (see http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2013/05/12/lean-in/ ).

    American Airlines serves coffee and they have anti-racism training: http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/30/news/american-airlines-diversity-naacp-travel-advisory/index.html

    What would be wrong with adopting the American Airlines syllabus?

  5. The Starbucks scene from Best In Show is fantastic. Nothing has changed in 18 years, except the demise of catalogs.

  6. I don’t know Phil, does American Airlines have a big problem with unknown unpaying people sitting on their planes for a long time? Does Facebook have a lot of non customers using their online restrooms? Are either companies employees mostly low or minimum wage and relatively short term?

    Starbucks may well want to adapt the American Airlines syllabus, but to adopt it as is wouldnt seem to show the level of responsibility that they are showing.

  7. The racism industry does not have the same need for speed as the construction industry, unless that construction is government-related, in which case there is a requirement for slowness

    another, longer video of the events leading up to the Starbucks arrests:
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8p33IWE1OLM

    All of this could have been avoided if these loiterers had watched Chris Rock’s “How Not To Get Your Ass Kicked By The Police”

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OEvMc-K8XHY

  8. Racism is not a significant part of contemporary American culture or life. Starbucks is retarded for responding the race baiters and allowing them to grandstand.

  10. The extensive self-flagellation by Starbucks obscures the real issue: The action taken by the police. The cops should have been able to asses the situation, decide the call was absurd, and leave without arresting anybody.

    I’ve committed the crime of waiting for people at a coffee shop multiple times (once with you!) and have yet to be arrested for it.

  11. Bathroom key access is different. It just plain is. If they have a customer-bathroom key, it’s really typical you have to, you know, be a customer. And these guys wouldn’t spend a few pennies when everyone knows the bathroom key situation is totally different than sitting around in at a table for hours.

    If you really have to go, as long as you actually try to follow the form of the rule (try to buy something anyway), then yeah, you’ll get the key without being a customer. But these guys apparently went out of their way to be jerks and violate the Bathroom Key Code and somehow the Starbucks employee(s) are being tarred and feathered.

  12. Wait a sec! Did you mean to say that a white and a non-white customer would use the bathroom differently? as long as they “actually try to follow the form of the rule”? We don’t want sexist remarks here, is that right? BTW, is the form really parabolic?

  13. As @JPeterson said, the main problem here is the police action. Racial sensitive or not, police is not trained well. They routinely shoot blacks because they fear for their life and panic, but black people cannot just panic or they get shot.

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