By Ronald Gross
Founder
Conversations New York
A barista at the Spring Street Starbucks in lower Manhattan yesterday afternoon slapped a sticker on my cup that read: RACE
TOGETHER.
He was following the suggestion of Starbucks president
Howard Shultz, who had announced the nation-wide campaign earlier in the
week. Starbucks wants staff and customers at its 7,000 shops across to U.S. to invite in-store
conversations about "issues of race, prejudice, and lack of economic
opportunity."
As I settled into a corner sofa, I asked the woman next to
me: "What do you think about talking about these issues in
Starbucks?"
"Not my cup of tea, frankly," she replied with
lower Manhattan coolness. "I come
here to calm down, or to take out.
Wrong time, wrong place."
But the couple who sat down on the other side of me was
interested. "It's naive, sure --
but it's a start," said Larry, a software developer. And his co-worker, Russell, added:
"We've talked about this at our shop, but it's actually easier with people
with whom you don't have a lot of baggage.
We've had some good talks with other customers, and with one of the
baristas."
The three of us
talked for 15 minutes. It was the longest conversation I'd had with
African Americans in over a month.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening stopping into
7 more Starbucks stores in a variety of
neighborhoods in Manhattan, getting as far uptown as the one on 168th Street
and Broadway. (That's 6 more stores
than were visited by Times reporter Sydney Ember for the article
on 3/19, p. B1.)
Total results: 6 illuminating conversations, 2
brush-offs. At two of the stores, the
people involved were talking seriously about continuing the discussion beyond
this encounter.
This Starbucks campaign is taking its lumps in the
blogosphere, where it's being accused of everything from grandiosity and
condescension, to manipulation and hypocrisy; some of the points -- about
Starbucks sourcing, corporate staffing, and HR policies -- are telling.
But from my totally unscientific sampling of 0.1 percent of Starbucks
stores nationwide, I'm giving two cheers
for this experiment in civic discourse.
Time was when coffee houses were hotbeds of citizen-to-citizen
conversations about issues that mattered -- such as in 18th century Britain and
America, where they made governments quake.
It's heartening to get even this
slight whiff of that amidst the white
foam.
