Starbucks' Effort to Talk About Race is Better Than Silence
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is urging baristas to engage customers in discussions about race and inequality -- as if his employees already were not busy enough trying to tell my coffee-and-espresso-shot from the next guy's vanilla latte.
Does Schultz really want to go there? I know he's a marketing genius. Who else could turn overpriced cups of coffee into a daily lifestyle choice for millions of drinkers world-wide?
Nevertheless, dumbing down America's complicated and emotionally charged racial divide into a topic light enough for a coffee shop chat is a tall order -- or, in Starbucks World, a "venti" sized order -- especially before I've had my morning caffeine.
Yet Schultz could hardly sound more sensible and sincere in his video on Starbucks' website about their "Race Together" campaign with USA Today. He asks his baristas to "perform that small gesture of writing 'Race Together' on a cup." They don't have to if they don't want to and customers who don't want the cup can exchange it for a plain cup.
But "if a customer asks you what this is," Schultz says in the video, "try and engage in a discussion, that we have problems in this country with regard to race and racial inequality, and we believe we're better than this, and we believe the country's better than this." Do it with just one customer, one day, Schultz says, and "you're making a significant difference."
I was waiting for him to call for everyone to join hands and sing, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." Mercifully he didn't.
But if anything makes me want to root for Schultz's sentimental campaign, it is the boneheaded comments coming from some of the cynics who want him to fail.
"Do you really have any idea who is promoting this?" writes one commenter at the Los Angeles Times website. "My bet it's a big Obama BS plan to make whites feel guilty for the blacks in Ferguson who have rioted and destroyed their town for NOTHING. Big O (President Barack Obama) and idiots like (Atty. Gen. Eric) Holder, Revs. Al (Sharpton) and Jesse (Jackson) who are looking like fools now. Race relations won't be improved by stupid plans like this."
Comments like this one -- and worse -- came in so fast and furiously after the "Race Together" campaign was announced that one senior vice president at Starbucks deleted his Twitter account, which invited more mockery for his rapid departure.
Yet, as one who often has called for more candid talk about race, I find value even in barely rational screeds like the one I quote above. It shows how much today's race debates are marked by dueling and often misinformed perceptions of privilege, fueled by political activists or pundits who feed more one-sided information.
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