Starbucks’ move a critically needed gesture
On May 29, Americans who need a Starbucks coffee to drive away their afternoon drowsiness on the first work day after the Memorial Day holiday will have to find alternatives. The cafe giant will close all of its more than 8,000 stores in the US that afternoon for anti-discrimination training. The company decided on the shutdown as part of its reaction to an incident in a Philadelphia store earlier this month when two black men who didn’t purchase anything declined to leave the shop when they were told to do so, and the manager, who was white, called the police, leading to their arrest. The arrests were videotaped by someone in the cafe and posted online. That quickly triggered protests and an image crisis for the coffee chain.
I have no doubt that Starbucks’ reaction has major PR considerations behind it, and a smart one indeed. Its response, including strong statements by the CEO condemning the calling of the police, is seen as perfection in terms of crisis communications. Similar incidents happen quite a lot in the US, often in individual cafes and restaurants that aren’t part of giant chains. Those may involve stores where non-English speaking customers were required to order in English or minority customers found derogatory words scribbled on their bills. Disputes occurred, shops apologized and related employees were fired. Each time stern action is taken the public fury eases.
But of course they won’t generate as many headlines as Starbucks’ self punishment. And with more than a month between the announcement and the date the actual training will take place, you bet there will soon be a second wave of media attention. The advertising value will be more than enough to offset the profit loss that afternoon. And it’s also hard for me to imagine what the training would be like and how it would work. Would you ask employees to allow anybody to sit in the shop and use the bathroom without purchasing anything? I doubt any chain of cafes wants to turn themselves into a chain of community centers. Or would you ask all such customers to leave without differentiating by their skin colors? There can’t be gray areas in training like this, which is tough when you are dealing with humans interacting. The possibility of an initiative backfiring is high. But despite my skepticism, I still think Starbucks’ gesture carries a lot of weight. By mandating training for employees, it displayed a definitive belief that people should be held accountable for their unconscious bias and that it can be corrected, a critically needed proclamation in today’s US. In the past few decades, the civil rights movement has largely cracked overt discrimination in this country. Mandatory segregation, disenfranchisement of women and the prohibition against miscegenation may sound like the equivalents of dinosaurs to new generations today. And when overt discrimination pops up occasionally, it is easy to smash it, thanks to the well-established laws that protect rights and equality.
But covert discrimination, often caused by unconscious bias, not only still exists, it is as rampant as its overt cousin once was, if not more. And it is much harder to thwart as it’s less tangible, and, most of the time the law’s hands are tied in front of it.
When a waitress only checks the quality of her service with the white customer at the table and ignores his or her black friend, how do you prove she is biased? When the traffic policeman only tickets the Chinese driver who double parks in a restricted area and ignores transgressions by three white drivers, how do you persuade the police officer he is wrong? Even after much research has found that job applications filed by people with typical black names are less likely to get a response from an employer, how do you hold the recruiters accountable? All in all, if the bias is unconscious, how do you help people correct their wrong beliefs when they don’t even realize they have those beliefs.
Because of these questions, many people avert their eyes from the problem and efforts to fight against covert discrimination are, at best, languishing. Sometimes even the victims choose to tolerate whatever is thrown at them rather than fighting back.
A half day training at Starbucks is not likely to provide answers to all these questions, and indeed it may not be able to come up with any answers at all. But it still deserves some headlines as at least it draws attention to the problem that many people may have almost conveniently forgotten. As for the answers, they can only be found when
everyone is participating.