648: Unteachable Moment
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So, you may have heard that last week Starbucks closed down all other U.S. stores, so they could do this big racial bias training program for everybody who worked at Starbucks. Same training at every store Starbucks owns, 8,000 stores, and for 175,000 people, a very eccentric corporate move that the company embarked on after an incident in Starbucks in Philadelphia in April that you probably heard about, two African-American members sitting there calmly waiting for a friend, a manager called the police who arrested them as customers asked why. "What did they do? What did they do? Someone told me they did." "They didn't do anything. I saw the entire thing." Here's what they did. They wanted to use the bathroom, but they hadn't bought anything. The manager said no. She asked them to leave. When they wouldn't leave, because they were there to meet somebody, the manager called the police. Two days after this, the company said that what happened was reprehensible, the calling the police was completely inappropriate, the company stands firmly against racial profiling, and then they went further and announced his training, which would shut down the stores for half a day and cost them tens of millions of dollars. That is not what companies normally do. Like normally when this kind of thing happens, companies either deny they did anything wrong or they accepted they did something wrong, and then they move on. Like they move on quickly. Moving on quickly is the key, but here Starbucks was taking this incident that was bad pressed for them from the start, and they decided to kind of own it, sit with it. And within it. And then more or less declared, we have a problem with racism in this country, and our answer to Philadelphia is that Starbucks is not only going to try to fix its own racism problem, it's going to try to help fix America's racism problem too, which I have to say is basically just inviting people from all sides to criticize them. And then the thing that they do is the biggest implicit bias training that's happened ever in all time, people argue about the effectiveness of implicit bias training anyway. I'm just trying to say Starbucks made a very unusual choice. Well, Calofasana has been examining that choice for us, and he went to attend the training itself, which we're going to get to. Our show is the only journalistic outfit that Starbucks allowed to attend one of these trainings, and we did record there that's coming up, Calofas normally a staff writer for the New Yorker. Hey, Calofas. Hey, Aria. Okay, so the thing that I personally wonder about is, okay, in a purely like practical way, Starbucks wanted their employees to not do racist stuff or racial profile anybody anymore, like a training like this seems so like squishy, you know, like who knows if this even works? Like why not do the most old fashioned thing out there? Like if they really care about this, why don't they just fire the manager, tell everybody else, okay, here's a new rule, do stuff like that, you lose your job, and then just like call it a day, you know?
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