On Sunday, Starbucks—the fave corporate beverage chain of urban whites everywhere—launched its #RaceTogether campaign with a full-page ad in The New York Times. Apparently the giant corporation’s overwhelmingly white owners want to stimulate a national conversation about racial matters between minimum-wage-earning baristas and customers who can afford to throw away seven dollars for a simple cup of Joe with a teaspoon of milk. The company is also encouraging its service workers to write “Race Together” on cups of coffee in order to, well, y’know, facilitate, stimulate, and possibly even exacerbate this conversation.
Here are 20 reactions to this announcement.
1.
Ask your
@Starbucks barista why there are zero Starbucks in Ferguson, Missouri. Then tell them to enjoy a hot cup of STFU.
#RaceTogether—Ben Shapiro
2.
Not sure what
@Starbucks was thinking. I don’t have time to explain 400 years of oppression to you & still make my train.
—@ReignofApril
3.
You can’t have an honest conversation about race with people whom you also have to make happy in order to pay your rent…. Is there a corporate guideline for how many times customers will have to hear a woman in Lululemon pants say, “I don’t see color” in between sips of her Oprah Chai Tea LatteTM before racism is cured?
—Ijeoma Oluo, the Guardian
4.
If Starbucks really wants to advance racial justice, they need to look at their labor practices, and not just their wages but also their anti-union ban.
—Irene Tung of the National Employment Law Project
5.
Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well.
—Gwen Ifill, PBS NewsHour
6.
The only folks happy about Starbucks baristas discussing race with customers are the suits who run it. Feel-good liberalism at its worst.
—Jamil Smith
7.
I’m not sure if it would be more racist or less racist if Starbucks made black coffee more expensive.
—Michael Malice, Thought Catalog writer
8.
I can envision awkward situations where the baristas ask a customer, “So how do you want your coffee?” to which the customer responds, “Black.” For some reason saying “black” in the context of this program could feel uncomfortable. Next thing you know, Starbucks will have to coin politically correct terms for “black” coffee.
—Dean Obeidallah, CNN
9.
Good morning, white person. Do you want room for guilt in your coffee?” … “Hello, person of color. Welcome to Starbucks. How oppressed are you feeling today?
—Trey Garrison, HousingWire
10.
Would you like to discuss the legacies of institutional racism with that vanilla latte, sir?
—Douglas Ernst, The Washington Times
11.
Even as someone who is completely okay with dedicating the rest of my life to talking about and solving for racism and discrimination, I’m not looking for a possibly contentious conversation about race during the morning coffee rush.
—Camonghne Felix, dosomething.org
12.
Tone-deaf and self-aggrandizing aspects of Race Together haven’t helped in establishing a strong base for employees to build on. Starbucks’ press photos for the event appear to feature only white employees.
—Kate Taylor, Entrepreneur magazine
13.
Thank you very much for making my coffee today. But next time I’ll just go to Dunkin’ Donuts, where no one’s conducting uncomfortable social experiments on unwitting customers who — inexplicably — thought that the goods-for-money exchange would be a sufficient enough transaction. Good luck solving racism.
—S. E. Cupp
14.
[A]s imperfect as racial dialogues held at Starbucks are likely to be, they may well be more constructive than many now happening online. So long as that is true, the web should cut Starbucks some slack.
—Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
15.
So no matter how ugly the discussion has been since I shut my account down, I’m reaffirming my belief in the power of meaningful, civil, thoughtful, respectful open conversation — on Twitter and everywhere else.
—Corey duBrowa, Starbucks vice president of communications, after shutting his Twitter account down once the “open conversation” was opened.
16.
[T]he clumsy nature of reducing a serious, impossibly complex national conversation to a hashtag on a coffee cup has united Twitter users of all races in roundly denouncing the attempt.
—Rebecca Cullers, AdWeek
17.
If the goal of Starbucks’
#RaceTogether was to bring together all races in laughing at their ridiculous idea, it’s working.
—Steve Krakauer