Waiting In Starbucks While Black

[Nick66]

Originally Posted by Iggy Fizz

I'm just glad there is something new for the country to be outraged over. We need something new every week. Otherwise we might be still talking about how today's rock music is girly.

Who has time to get worked up about this when there are more important things to get worked up about, like who Sean Hannity's lawyer is!

[corianderstem]

Interesting. We did this ten years ago as well, although that was just to do a retraining on espresso or something like that.

Starbucks will close 8,000 US stores May 29 for racial-bias training

[Nick66]

Originally Posted by corianderstem

Interesting. We did this ten years ago as well, although that was just to do a retraining on espresso or something like that.

Starbucks will close 8,000 US stores May 29 for racial-bias training

The expresso training will probably be more useful.

[corianderstem]

Originally Posted by Nick66

expresso

expresso

expresso

[Nick66]

See! I said I wasn't as smart as Irvine thinks!

[DaveC]

it wasn't okay when dire straits did it and it's not okay now.

[Iggy Fizz]

Originally Posted by Nick66

The expresso training will probably be more useful.

yeah I hate to be cynical but after having been through numerous diversity training excercises and what not in my career so far, it's hard not to be.

if you are a bigoted asshole, a trite lecture from a corporate trainer is not going to fix things.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by Nick66

See! I said I wasn't as smart as Irvine thinks!

That honesty cred you think you have just took a big hit.

[Nick66]

There have been several studies on such training (diversity, sexual harassment, etc.) a while back, that resurfaced after the Weinstein/#metoo movement. The upshot was that such trainings are rarely useful, and in fact can often have the opposite effect than intended.

In any event, most employees don't take it seriously, and these things are done as legal CYA, and the in the case of Starbucks, PR and damage control. And it will probably work, the social media mob will find another outrage soon enough and move on to the next thing.

[Nick66]

Originally Posted by DaveC

it wasn't okay when dire straits did it and it's not okay now.

See! That's ecactly what I was doing! Quoting Dire Straights! Finally someone gets my humour.

You sir, are a genius.

[corianderstem]

Will it help? I dunno. But you know what? I'm glad I work for a company who gives a shit.

[Irvine511]

thought provoking article that i have some mixed feelings towards.

From Starbucks to Hashtags: We Need to Talk About Why White Americans Call the Police on Black People

When white people threaten to call the police on black people—out of anger, out of spite, out of pure vindictiveness—they are effectively saying, “I’ll kill you!” They’re just using a legal extension of white supremacy to do it. It’s high time we start considering these bigots just as much a threat as the police they summon to do their bidding.

This week, black America added “sitting at Starbucks waiting for a white friend” to the list of things that we cannot safely do without fear of police violence. Previous entries included sitting in your car, sitting in someone else’s car, standing on your front porch, standing on your back porch, surviving a car accident, asking for directions to school and, of course, breathing.

As a black man in America who has been harassed by police more times than I can count, I wasn’t surprised by the viral Starbucks video at all. However, my anger is directed not just at the cops but also at the cowardly Starbucks manager who made the call to the police to begin with. The men and women making these outrageous and unwarranted calls to police, which result in the harassment, unfair prosecution and even death of people of color, need to be found, publicly shamed and prosecuted to the full extent that the law allows.

No, I’m not talking about Dave Reiling, the man who reported an actual crime in Sacramento, Calif., that the police used as an excuse to shoot Stephon Clark in his own backyard. Calling the police to report an actual crime that the police overact to is not the citizen’s fault, no matter what color he or she is. I’m talking about the hundreds of cases—that we know about—every year, where white Americans actively and knowingly use the police as an extension of their personal bigotry yet face no consequences.

I’m talking about the white woman at the Red Roof Inn outside of Pittsburgh who called the cops on me because I disputed the charges on my bill and asked to speak to a manager. I’m talking about the white woman who called the cops on me last year even though she knew I was walking with political canvassers for Jon Ossoff’s congressional campaign in North Atlanta. I’m talking about the police officer who followed me behind my house in Hiram, Ohio, asking where I lived because he’d “gotten some calls about robberies.”

In each and every single one of these instances, a white person used the cops as his or her personal racism valets, and I was the one getting served. In each of these instances, I could have been arrested, beaten up or worse based on nothing more than the word of a white person whom I made uncomfortable. As sick as this all is, I still consider myself lucky.

Tamir Rice was killed at the tender age of 12 because a man who admitted to spending the afternoon drinking called 911 to report a “juvenile” who was probably carrying a “fake” gun. Constance Hollinger, the 911 dispatcher, who failed to deliver that information to the cops, got an eight-day suspension but kept her job, and there was no investigation into the caller. Tamir is still dead.

Then there’s Ronald T. Ritchie, who told 911 that John Crawford III was running around Walmart “menacing children” with a shotgun. Crawford, holding a BB gun—sold at Walmart—in the open carry state of Ohio, was shot and killed by police. Despite clear evidence that Ritchie lied to the 911 dispatcher, which is a crime, no charges were filed against him.

You can get arrested for pulling a fire alarm, making fake bomb threats and making false claims of an alien invasion—why not a false police report that results in death? We should be pushing for prosecution against these callers just as much as the cops who pull the trigger.

That’s why I knew Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson’s statement on the Philadelphia incident was trash: “Our store manager never intended for these men to be arrested and this should never have escalated the way it did ... ”

Either Johnson is lying or hasn’t been white in America as long as I’ve been black in America. Calling the police is the epitome of escalation, and calling the police on black people for noncrimes is a step away from asking for a tax-funded beatdown, if not an execution. That Starbucks manager didn’t call the police in hopes that they’d politely ask two black customers to buy a latte or leave, just as the angry woman in front of my apartment wasn’t threatening to call the cops just to get her boyfriend to listen to her. The intent of these actions is to remind black people that the ultimate consequence of discomforting white people—let alone angering them—could be death.

[Hewson]

That first sentence does a lot of damage to the author's credibility right out of the gate.

[Nick66]

Well the writer's ridiculous assertions about calling the cops being a death sentence obscure what is a salient point...that some irrational white people do in fact misuse 911 whenever they feel panicky about someone of colour.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Using a coupon in CVS while black apparently now also warrants calling the police.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...r-over-n891596

[codeguy]

Originally Posted by MrsSpringsteen

They were there to meet the white guy in the video, to discuss a real estate deal. So they should have ordered something in order to not be loitering? I did read one account that claimed that the employee called the police because they used the bathroom without ordering.

I sat outside a Panera Bread last week for about 10 minutes, waiting for an Uber. No one called me out for it or called the police. How many officers were in that Starbucks? It looked like a blatant overreaction to me. Police are trained to do everything to try to deescalate such situations, no? The one officer in that video, the way he pushed the chair..I don't think he was happy about the comments from the white guy or the fact that it was being recorded.

That’s the thing. Any company has the right to deny non-paying customers from using their bathrooms, the issue is that they were treated differently because of their race.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Just saw this woman on the local news, she was crying during the entire interview.

The police were called by a college employee because she "seemed out of place" eating lunch at Smith College. She's a student working there over the summer. She's black.


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0fd5c73d6ee6d

[Hewson]

If it were a male, I could see being out of place at Smith, but that's about it.

[dazzledbylight]

and it goes on and on and on and...

[Gzusfrk]

You’re exactly right, this racism and intolerance must stop.

https://www.facebook.com/comedianbry...5210079348954/

#walkaway