What Starbucks Got Right—and ABC Got Wrong—About Racism
On Tuesday, as the corporate headquarters of ABC Entertainment were swept up in a race maelstrom of Roseanne Barr’s making, approximately 175,000 Starbucks employees were undergoing implicit-bias training across the country. The four-hour-long program was a corporate mea culpa after viral video captured the arrest of two black men in a Starbucks for, effectively, being black in a Starbucks. There was a certain symbolism unfolding through the day: one corporation trying to resolve its wrongs, another showcasing how unsolvable the wrongs remain.
While Barr’s racist tweet seemed almost anachronistic in its vulgarity—the crudeness of the comparison between a powerful African American woman and an ape seemed a holdover from to cancel suggests that there is no corporate manual for this moment. For the people who have compared , , and to apes, what possible line of argument is there? There doesn’t even seem to be a common language.
