We Went to Starbucks to Talk to Baristas About Race
If you want to take a noble ambition and turn it into a bad idea, give it to a brand. It doesn’t matter how good that ambition actually is in purest form; we know that attaching a corporate logo to it corrupts its sentiments and subordinates them to market leverage and praise of the corporate status quo. If the Sermon on the Mount had originally been delivered by Nike, we’d all be wearing Jordans and still speaking Latin and getting our horoscopes through pig entrails.
You didn’t need divination to predict activists’ reaction to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s idea to have baristas write “Race Together” on customers’ coffee cups to stimulate a week of national dialogue about race. One: get bent, Howie. Two: this isn’t going to work. America is full up on “dialogue” already, and this is probably no more helpful than doing nothing at all — unless the point is seeing Starbucks as a good corporation. To see it in action, you can just walk into a Starbucks.
I did. While Starbucks trumpets counting minorities as 40 percent of its employees, that’s a nationwide figure. Large cities are probably over-represented in terms of having a barista of color to buttonhole you about a frank discussion of the hurdles they must leap to overcome the white privilege to which you are blind. What a white barista with a predominantly white customer base is supposed to say is anyone’s guess. “Hey, so the last half a millennium of un-self-reflective global hegemony? Not the best look, right? And what’s your name? Oh, Bobby Lee? Is that spelled with an IE or just a Y?” In the suburban Starbucks I visited, there were neither minority employees nor customers. I drank an iced tea and waited.
It took about 20 minutes for a couple of minority customers to show up, and mercifully none of the three white baristas opted to engage them in a racial dialogue. The couple spoke animatedly to each other in Spanish and only curtly in English to order. When I approached them and launched into a patiently enunciated question, the man waved me off and gave me a “no hablo Inglés,” which was probably bullshit, but which is exactly what I would say to an invitation to join a dialogue on race, and that’s the full extent of my Spanish beyond the sex words.
It took nearly 45 minutes to see the next person of color arrive, a tall black woman in her early 50s, wearing a comfortable black dress and shoes and carrying a practical messenger-type bag. Only after she’d gotten her coffee and been able to sit down and take a breath — after, presumably, the baristas had had a chance to rap with her about the African-American experience — did I feel like I could barge in on her leisure time. Her name was Anita, and she was new to the area, working as a concierge consultant for wealthy homeowners who travel. Despite reading the newspaper and going to Starbucks up to five times a week, she had no idea “Race Together” was happening. That didn’t keep her from instantly echoing some of the most common points of criticism that had already appeared in the media.
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