Starbucks’ effort to talk about race is better than silence

By Clarence Page

Saturday, March 28, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz urged baristas to engage customers in discussions about race and inequality — as if his employees already were not busy enough trying to tell my coffee-and-espresso-shot from the next guy’s vanilla latte.

Does Schultz really want to go there? I know he’s a marketing genius. Who else could turn overpriced cups of coffee into a daily lifestyle choice for millions of drinkers worldwide?

Nevertheless, dumbing down America’s complicated and emotionally charged racial divide into a topic light enough for a coffee shop chat was a tall order — or, in Starbucks World, a “venti”-sized order — especially before I’ve had my morning caffeine.

Yet, Schultz could hardly sound more sensible and sincere in his video on Starbucks’ website about their “Race Together” campaign with USA Today. He asked his baristas to “perform that small gesture of writing ‘Race Together’ on a cup.” They didn’t have to if they didn’t want to, and customers who don’t want the cup can exchange it for a plain cup.

But “if a customer asks you what this is,” Schultz said in the video, “try and engage in a discussion, that we have problems in this country with regard to race and racial inequality, and we believe we’re better than this, and we believe the country’s better than this.” Do it with just one customer, one day, Schultz said, and “you’re making a significant difference.”

Starbucks announced Sunday it was ending the cup messages but planned to continue the diversity and racial inequality campaign more broadly. The cups were “just the catalyst” for a larger conversation, and Starbucks will still hold forum discussions, co-produce special sections in USA TODAY and put more stores in minority communities as part of the Race Together initiative, according to a company memo from Schultz said.

I was waiting for him to call for everyone to join hands and sing, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Mercifully, he didn’t.

But if anything makes me want to root for Schultz’s sentimental campaign, it is the boneheaded comments coming from some of the cynics who want him to fail.

“Do you really have any idea who is promoting this?” one commenter on the Los Angeles Times website wrote. “My bet it’s a big Obama BS plan to make whites feel guilty for the blacks in Ferguson who have rioted and destroyed their town for nothing. Big O (President Barack Obama) and idiots like (Atty. Gen. Eric) Holder, Revs. Al (Sharpton) and Jesse (Jackson) who are looking like fools now. Race relations won’t be improved by stupid plans like this.”

Comments like this one — and worse — came in so fast and furiously after the “Race Together” campaign was announced that one senior vice president at Starbucks deleted his Twitter account, which invited more mockery for his rapid departure.

Yet, as one who often has called for more candid talk about race, I find value even in barely rational screeds like the one I quote above. It shows how much today’s race debates are marked by dueling and often misinformed perceptions of privilege, fueled by political activists or pundits who feed more one-sided information.

A dramatic example is offered by the mixed reaction to the two reports that Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department produced about police in Ferguson, Mo.

Conservatives crow about the report that concludes, contrary to earlier accounts by some since-discredited witnesses, white police officer Darren Wilson killed black teen Michael Brown in self-defense, not after Brown raised his hands in surrender.

But supporters of justice for Brown point just as vigorously to the other report, which also has led to a series of resignations in local government. It found years of mistreatment of blacks by Ferguson’s police, courts and municipal government. All three, the report found, balanced their books by disproportionately squeezing fines, fees and court costs out of the wallets of blacks.

Yet, some of the loudest voices on both sides of the color line embrace one report and ignore the other. Racial anger, fear, resentments and suspicions are made worse when we pay attention only to those voices or facts that agree with our prejudices.

There’s plenty to criticize about Schultz’s campaign and the awkward position into which it put Starbucks’ baristas and customers. But slapping down the idea too harshly sends a bad message too. It says that any effort to improve interracial understanding, no matter how modest, will be harshly rebuked, whether it has merit or not.

Americans usually have our national conversations about race only after a crisis like Ferguson blows up. Schultz is trying instead to generate a lot of little conversations nationwide. Whether it works or not, it’s probably better than silence.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.