Grounds for hope

The Starbucks manager who last week called 911 on two black men in Philadelphia for “trespassing” made a doozy of a racially tinged mistake — and unleashed a torrent of stories from African Americans about how often they are viewed with suspicion if not hostility in places where others are welcome.

But one bad move by one of the coffee giant’s 175,000 employees at one of its 8,000 companyowned U.S. outlets does not a racist behemoth make, nor give grounds for a nationwide boycott.

The Philly manager has been reassigned. CEO Kevin Johnson has bent over backward to make amends; Tuesday he apologized to the two men face-to-face. Further, the company announced that all stores it owns (another 6,000 are run by licensees) will be closed one day next month for racial bias education.

These are signs of a chastened company behaving responsibly.

Nor need Starbucks apologize for having a standard bathrooms-are-for-customers-only policy, so long as it makes sure it’s applied fairly.

All of which is why we can’t help but wince when we see activists haranguing baristas as bigots, or tools of some bigoted overlord, just because they wear the mermaid logo.

The problem here was that one employee jumped to an ignorant, broad-brush conclusion about two men who were doing nothing wrong. Demonstrators should stop themselves from repeating the same sin.