Promoting Our Bad Behavior

WE ALL RECALL the relatively recent racial incident in Philly, when two young African-American gentlemen were summarily kicked out of a Starbucks for doing nothing discernable other than being black, which, to b e honest, is one of the most personally damaging mistakes one can make in America, the land of white privilege. These particular gentlemen said they were waiting for a friend to arrive and meet them, and they declined to order anything until the friend's arrival. They never got the chance Several other patrons noticed the problem immediately and began to protest their treatment... Although the incident attracted considerable media attention, the attention was the typical fly by type, which would have vanished as quickly as it came, and Starbucks could easily have weathered the storm simply by ignoring, and letting it dissipate in the constant background noise. The tempest in a teapot would have vanished in days, gone from the public mind like all corporate corruption soon is. Not only did the coffee giant choose not to do this; it chose to actually take ownership of the event, to embrace it, to publicize and promote it. The rest, as they say, is history. the company shut down entirely for one afternoon, all hundreds of thousands of stores, and conducted "sensitivity training" for all employees, accompanied by much pre seminar promotion, fanfare, and talk. Almost as if Starbucks had decided to use the whole affair as a vehicle for an advertising campaign, a question which caused some controversy. The corporation, speaking as a human being, assured us that its motives were entirely altruistic, not commercial. Each local in store event was conducted by local management; there was not time to hire tens of thousands of sensitivity training experts. The general theme was racial tolerance, sensitivity, and blindness in a progressive, egalitarian America, or something like that. Stuff we all already know, or like to think we do.