Starbucks bias recalls ’15 case for comic Bell
When Starbucks announced Tuesday that it will close more than 8,000 stores for a day of racial-bias education for its employees, W. Kamau Bell wondered if the effort would be more than “a splashy headline.”
The unusual step by Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson came amid national outrage over an incident last week in which police handcuffed and forcibly removed two black men from a Philadelphia Starbucks after employees called 911, complaining that the men had not purchased anything and refused to leave. The men were detained for nine hours before being released.
Viral video of the arrests has sparked protests and calls to boycott all Starbucks coffee shops.
Bell, a black Bay Area comedian and CNN host, had a similar experience in 2015 when he was ordered to leave a Berkeley coffee shop, though no one called police in his case. An employee at Elm-
wood Cafe suspected he was bothering a group of customers — four white women seated at an outdoor cafe table — and shooed him away. One of the women was his wife, and Bell had just strolled up to say hello to her and her friends. Bell wrote about the incident in his blog, which resulted in news coverage of the incident.
In his case, Bell said, the Elmwood Cafe owner pledged a major biaseducation campaign that never materialized. Time will tell how serious Starbucks is about effecting change, he said.
“In the middle of the heat you say, ‘No, we’re going to change everything.’ When the pressure goes down, you go back to business as usual,” Bell said. “The Elmwood Cafe definitely went back to business as usual.”
The owner of the Elmwood Cafe could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Starbucks said thousands of stores will close the afternoon of May 28 to give 175,000 employees “racial-bias education geared toward preventing discrimination in our stores.”
In a statement, Johnson said that “closing our stores for racial bias training is just one step in a journey that requires dedication from every level of our company and partnerships in our local communities.”
It’s a sentiment Bell shares. The key to real change, he said, is giving activists “a seat at the table.”
“You have to bring in people from the outside who are going to tell you things you don’t want to hear,” Bell said. “You don’t do it in a corporate way where you bring in some corporate companies that say don’t discriminate against customers because it’s bad for business. I’ve been in those diversity training workshops. You do it for a day, you glaze over, and then you go back to what you’re doing.”
Still, the root of the problem extends beyond both incidents, Bell said. It harks back to larger systemic problems involving race in America, as the situation has prompted several people online to point to blackowned coffee shops as alternatives.
“I just think it’s bigger than two black men kicked out of a coffee shop. It’s bigger than me at the Elmwood Cafe,” he said. “The same racism that gets the black men kicked out of the coffee shop is the same racism that gets that black teenager shot at when he’s asking for directions.”
He plans on visiting Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, a black-owned business that has been listed as an alternative to Starbucks in online discussions.
Red Bay founder Keba Konte said his business has received calls from people across the country asking for locations in their cities, boosting expansion plans the company already had in the works.
“What happened was that there was a racist incident and there was a glaring sort of racial bias exhibited by Starbucks. I believe that that is what happens when you lack diversity,” Konte said, though he noted that Starbucks recently hired an African American chief operating officer, Rosalind Brewer.
At Red Bay’s coffee shop in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood on Tuesday, General Manager Antoine Hicks called the Starbucks situation “saddening but not surprising.”
“This is a space that would never allow something like that to happen,” he said.
In the incident made public last week, the men asked to use the restroom. Employees refused access because they hadn’t bought anything and asked them to leave. The pair were meeting a friend who runs a real estate development firm to discuss business investment opportunities. When they refused to leave, employees called 911, the Washington Post reported.
Video shows police leading the two unidentified men out of the store as their friend, identified by the Post as Andrew Yaffe, protests.
“Why would they be asked to leave?” Yaffe said in the video. “Does anybody else think this is ridiculous? It’s absolute discrimination.”
The video immediately took Bell back to his own incident, which led to a community meeting in 2015 where Elmwood Cafe’s owner, Michael Pearce, promised a widereaching education campaign, Bell said.
Bell said he and Pearce began exchanging emails about the project for around two weeks in late June and early July of that year. After July 7, 2015, Bell said, Pearce never returned his email. Efforts to reach Pearce were not immediately successful.
Bell said he sent one last email Feb, 5, 2016, in part writing, “I had really hoped that when you sat in my house talking about your plans that you were serious and wanted to turn this into something good. But the fact that I see this email has gone un-returned from several months ago says something different.”