For starters, I never cared for the coffee. Bitter, maybe over roasted. When my son treated me once in Boston, his tab for two coffees — not frappuccinos, lattes or espressos — was $8. Two black coffees, $8.

That was my only Starbucks coffee. I couldn’t handle the bitterness and the price, so for one of the few times in my life — folks who grow up poor learn early to empty their plate or cup because the next meal isn’t a sure thing — I dumped a food item into the trash.

But Kevin Johnson, Starbucks CEO, may win me over. The company has treated its 175,000 American employees pretty well. College tuition aid, health insurance, etc. Those high prices helped make that possible, and I have nearly weakened a few times. And, had I been paying enough attention, I’d have noticed that the high prices are down almost to mainstream. Not the $1 coffee of a C-store, but comparable to restaurants in the $1.50 to $2 range. Unless you want them to squirt that other stuff into it. I don’t.

So, when Johnson closed all 8,000 stores Tuesday for sensitivity training, I listened up.

This began on April 12 when a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia, a city with a difficult racial history, called the cops on two men who were waiting at a table in her store for a third person to arrive. Some reports say the men asked to use the restroom. Others say the men planned to order when the third person arrived. None of that mattered to the manager. She called the cops to toss them.

Oh, yeah. The two men are African-American.

This is a perfect example of institutional, or cultural, racism. It is built into our way of looking at people and situations. We white folks carry in our brains a complex set of ideas about folks who aren’t like us. Brown and black folks no doubt carry similar sets of ideas about folks who aren’t like them. But we are the majority, at least for a few more years, so we have some power to make ours the dominant ideas of the culture.

I can’t pretend to know what was in the mind of the Starbucks manager — she no longer works for the company — but it is easy to imagine that without thinking she processed “two black men, didn’t buy anything, in our restroom, may be trouble, call the cops.”

Other examples.

Last Sunday, the women’s basketball coach at the University of California was boarding a Southwest Airlines flight — I seldom fly, but when I do, I go Southwest — in Denver when the gate agent challenged her claim that the one-year-old with her was her son. Despite his passport bearing his picture. The boy’s father is black, and the boy carries his father’s family name. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Airlines aren’t required to match children to adults by name.

Roxane Gay recounted other examples on Wednesday in The New York Times. A white woman called the cops on a black graduate student at Yale who was taking a nap in her dormitory’s lounge. The student had to prove to the cops that she had a right to be in her dorm on her campus. At Yale. Would that white woman have called the cops on a white graduate student taking a nap?

A white woman in Southern California called the cops on three black women checking out of an Airbnb because she thought the black women must be stealing the luggage they were loading into their car. Would that white woman have called the cops on three white women loading luggage into a car?

Employees at a Nordstrom store in St. Louis, another city with a tough racial history, trailed three black teenagers who were shopping for prom clothes. Cops met the kids when they left the store with the clothes they had bought. Would the store have called the cops on white kids shopping for their prom?

My friend in Kansas City was an officer in the AmVets, a smaller and more diverse version of the American Legion. His state board of directors met in St. Louis, 247 miles cross-state. He told me he always allowed an extra half hour for the trip because he knew he would be stopped by the Missouri Highway Patrol. He was never issued a ticket or even a warning for his driving. He was stopped simply for, as black folks report time and again, “driving while black.” Do white AmVets officials have to build an extra half hour into their plans because they know they will be pulled over for driving while white?

We’re not talking about stupid people. Say, Roseanne Barr, who thinks overt racism can be made into a joke. Or folks who justify race jokes because comedians such as Chris Rock tell jokes with the N-word. As a co-worker in a bank in New York City told me 54 years ago, “I can say Polack because I’m Polish. You can’t because you’re not.”

Or what I heard Wednesday morning in a restaurant, when a customer told the server he didn’t need cream for his coffee. “I’m going black today,” he said. “Oh, like Roseanne,” the server replied. I let it slide, even though I was known in the restaurant for having walked out some months ago when a customer loudly proclaimed the N-word twice.

To change the culture will require white folks to think billions of times about the ideas we carry around in our heads about people who aren’t like us. Kevin Johnson took several million of those steps when he had his employees sit down and think and talk about how they relate, usually subconsciously, to people who aren’t like them.

I’ve started on that journey. For example, when I refer to my favorite basketball player at the University of Maine, I don’t call her a “black player.” I look for something she’s wearing, for example, and say, “the player in the blue sweater.” I would not refer to one of her 11 white teammates as a “white player.”

It’s a step.

Bob Neal, a daily coffee and tea drinker, may need to learn about venti and grande and trenta. But only for coffee, none of that sticky stuff that turns coffee into something else.

 

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