Starbucks stirs up extreme racial animosity with condescending corporate public relations FAIL: #RaceTogether

Thursday, March 19, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: Starbucks, RaceTogether, race relations

---

(NaturalNews) Starbucks, the same company that still serves milk from cows fed genetically modified animal feed, is being absolutely crucified today across social media for its wildly ignorant "#RaceTogether" P.R. campaign. The ill-fated campaign calls for baristas to hand-write "#RaceTogether" on Starbucks cups, and the publicity for it features a bunch of white people's hands holding those cups.

"May I have a latte and an explanation for why your people continue to plunder my country? #RaceTogether" tweeted a user named Elle La Negra.

"I don't have time to explain 400 years of oppression to you & still make my train," said another tweet.

Another user named Black Power Alt Bro tweets, "Y'all realize there are no coloured hands in the press photos, right? @Starbucks #RaceTogether"

A Daily Mail article characterizes the Starbucks campaign as "cringe-inducing and patronizing" and said Twitter users "subjected [Starbucks] executives to a wave of mockery."



The Daily Mail reports on the astonishing development of Starbucks' Senior Vice President actually deleting his Twitter account in a failed attempt stop the wave of negative reaction. Predictably, it backfired:

Corey duBrowa, the company's Senior Vice President of Global Communications, was forced to delete his Twitter account, before re-activating it the next day.

'Last night I felt personally attacked in a cascade of negativity,' he said in a post on Medium. 'I got overwhelmed by the volume and tenor of the discussion, and I reacted'.

Why rich, powerful corporations just don't get it

The condescending "Starbucks-is-your-race-relations-therapist" idea behind the Starbucks campaign describes everything that's totally wrong with the way rich, powerful corporations view race relations in America. "It was hoped that customers who encounter the slogan on their coffee cup would be inspired to discuss the deeper issues affecting America, in an attempt to 'create a more empathetic and inclusive society - one conversation at a time'." reports the Daily Mail.

It's just so bizarre: Is a white person buying a latte supposed to see this "#RaceTogether" phrase scribbled on their cup and spontaneously seek out a dark-skinned person in the room and say something along the lines of, "Hi. I'm white. Thanks to this Starbucks corporate P.R. campaign, I'd like to learn more about YOUR PEOPLE..." Seriously?

"I'm in shock and awe -- in awe that the company is trying it, shocked they think it will work," wrote Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a TIME Magazine commentary piece. "...I worry that such conversations could quickly escalate to violence."

Starbucks wants to be your race relations therapist

In one fell swoop, Starbucks now wants to be your race relations therapist, as if under-paid baristas hand-writing "#RaceTogether" on coffee cups could accomplish anything other than antagonizing people with condescending corporate finger-wagging.

When it comes to race relations, Starbucks not only misses the point, they don't even seem to be from the same planet as all the people who are harmed by real racism. And by "real racism," I mean the corporate exploitation of the world's underprivileged minorities -- some of the very same people who probably pick the coffee and work the genetically modified cattle feed farms that produce dairy ingredients for the wealthy coffee chain.

Hey Starbucks, you want to really solve racism? Investigate your own supply chain and the laborers who bring all those raw materials to your stores. You'll find a goldmine of racial bias to sort out under your own corporate roof. Don't wag your finger at your customers until you root out racial bias in your own house, ya dig?

Racism can't be cured with a cheap corporate slogan

The cultural miscalculation of Starbucks executives who think they can compensate for their own unethical business operations with magic marker memes written on coffee cups is just staggering. And yet it's precisely the kind of patronizing corporate-cheapened linguistic drizzle we've come to expect from a corporate capitalist culture that's totally out of touch with the real needs of real people who live in a world that's truly unfair.

You want to really solve economic racism in America? END THE FED. Stop the central banks from stealing money from the working poor by debasing the money supply. Let people keep more of the money they earn. And while you're at it, end the federal income tax. Everybody knows the government doesn't need income tax revenues to actually run anything. The government can instantly create trillions of dollars out of nothing, and they can use that money to fund anything they want. After all, they did it over and over again when bailing out the "too big to fail" rich banksters beginning in 2008. The government doesn't need to levy income taxes on anyone, period!

But back to Starbucks, consider this important truth: Racism can't be cured with a corporate slogan. Yes, perhaps Starbucks deserves some credit for trying, but across the board, wealthy corporations only worsen the problem of racism by exploiting minorities for profit. As we see clear as day with the cancer industry and its profiteering from dark-skinned people who are chronically vitamin D deficient (because dark skin blocks UV creation by the skin when exposed to sunlight), minorities who have cancer generate huge profits for the cancer industry.

Instead of empowering African-Americans with the knowledge to take vitamin D and prevent cancer, the cancer industry preys upon them and literally attempts to keep them ignorant of this natural cancer prevention tool so that they can make more money from breast cancer and prostate cancer that disproportionately afflicts African-Americans. (White skin generates more vitamin D when exposed to sunlight, lowering the risk of cancer for fair-skinned people.)

Corporate America is a culture of exploitation and subjugation of the underprivileged. Almost no large corporate entity genuinely wants to help uplift minorities from poverty. As another salient example of this, consider the billions of dollars earned each year by Wal-Mart and JPMorgan for running EBT card transactions (government food stamps). They collect enormous fees from every food stamp purchase, actually profiting from the downward spiral of lost economic opportunities that disproportionately harm minorities by trapping them in economic poverty. Yes, wealthy corporations PROFIT from poverty. (It's also no coincidence that a large portion of Wal-Mart workers are, themselves, on government food stamps.)

The prison industry is a corporate-run slave labor scheme that ensnares minorities

The for-profit prison industry, too, preys upon minorities caught in "victimless crimes" such as the possession of a small amount of weed. Many private prisons are now launched under contract to states that agree to fill those prisons to a minimum of 90% capacity. Prisons become the new "slave labor working class," where millions of young men are swept off the streets with contrived arrests and wholly corrupted justice rackets, then put to work in the prison system, creating obscene profits for the corporations that contract with the prisons for literal slave labor. Yes, this is happening here in America.

As a financially well-off white person, I am fully aware that I can hire high-priced lawyers to come to my defense if I'm ever falsely accused of a crime by some crooked police officer. But a typical low-wage African-American citizen has no such means to defend himself against a false arrest. And the juries almost always hold their own racial bias -- even many black jurors! -- where they unfairly assume a young black man must be guilty merely because he's black. The justice system in America today is, itself, utterly racist to the core.

For a company like Starbucks -- which doesn't even acknowledge these corporate exploitations of blacks in America today -- to think that some do-gooder hashtag meme is going to address the real root of the systematic corporate marginalization of minorities is beyond ignorant. It's truly idiotic.

We don't need hashtags. We need to seriously reform community policing. Radically reform the prison system. Decriminalize small quantities of marijuana. Invest in community job training programs that teach people real job skills. Teach low-income minorities how to grow their own food (a la www.FoodRising.org). End the government monopoly on America's failed education system so that free market schools can uplift the quality of schooling in inner cities. Stop the world's central banks from stealing everybody's earnings and savings. Demilitarize local police departments. And above all, stop giving airtime to all the usual race baiters who only inflame race relations for their own personal gain.

Here's a new meme for Starbucks that might get more traction in the real world: #AdmitCorporateExploitationOfMinorities

Sources for this article include:
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3000...
[2] http://time.com/3749633/kareem-abdul-jabbar-...