Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/17/starbucks-racism.html
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Wow. This may or may not help in the long run, but good on them.
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It’s relatively difficult to impress me in matters of race & equality, but this gets 2 thumbs up from me.
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I think this has more to do with fixing bad PR and hopefully preventing it in the future. If only a meeting about proper behavior and policy can change the minds and hearts of men.
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My bet? Webinar.
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The cynical part of me agrees with you.
Nevertheless, this is a huge step in the right direction. It’s going to hit their bottom line (8000 stores closed for a couple hours) and cost them money to pay the trainers. They are definitely putting their money where their mouth is.
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Of course its a PR move but having worked for Starbucks twice in my younger years i did get excellent training and it was all hands on. No video, was direct interaction with my managers and supervisors. Things have likely changed since then but i had a really positive experience working for the company both times.
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It’s a step in the right direction.
Cue the freakout on the extremist right in response to this decision, any time now…
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Doing the training is great. Making the training materials publically available is exceptional.
Closing all the stores is a PR stunt. They could have done this after hours, or rolled it out to small groups of employees over a period of time. That said, there’s nothing wrong with a PR stunt. Making a big public deal out of this is a good thing. It’s an excellent way of them changing the narrative. Instead of just apologizing for their mistake, they’re flipping it and becoming the poster child of the company that takes racial bias seriously.
I would love to see if there’s any noticeable effect of depriving everyone of coffee for an afternoon. Will US productivity go down? go up? Will competitors have their best day ever?
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It is. Not only does it help insulate a racist manager from harming the brand and store, it does re-enforce the social unacceptability of it. So it has both selfish and better for society outcomes, I hope.
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Oh! Pornhub is usually good about this sort of thing!
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They could have done it on the down low, but that wouldn’t do anything to counter the really bad PR they just suffered in Philadelphia.
At least they aren’t doubling down and trying to claim what happened should be considered sane and normal.
Once completed, the company will make the education materials available to other companies, including our licensee partners, for use with their employees and leadership.
I’m hoping these education materials are leaked to the general public, so we can see what they come up with.
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Wow. Just wow. This makes me want to patronize Starbucks more often. Like maybe once or twice a year, like when I’m desperate (being silly… they get full respect for doing this, whether it helps or not, but I still hate them as an invading hegemonic corporation).
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I don’t see it being a PR move as a bad thing, really. It was always my impression that the entire strategy for dealing with corporations revolved around them being… not people, but more of a system set up for generating money. Interfere with income and you can change the way the system behaves. I don’t really expect anything more out of something that isn’t actually alive.
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OK.
When are they going to be taught how to make coffee?
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They have more troubles than the incident in Phillie.
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Yes indeed.
Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative; Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; Heather McGhee, president of Demos; former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder; and Jonathan Greenblatt, ceo of the Anti-Defamation League.
will all be very handsomely paid. And at the end of the process, they will all give Starbucks a smiling seal of approval.
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