On Thursday April 12th 2018 two men were removed
from a Starbucks after being asked repeatedly to leave by the store manager.
The men asked to use the restroom and were told it was for
paying customers only. They were asked to leave and when they refused the
manager called the police.
The police arrived and that is when the camera started to
roll.
Who Cares?
That video went viral across the Internet and made its way
onto mainstream media. Why would anyone care about two people getting being
asked to leave a business and when they refused to do so had the cops come and
remove them from the premises?
It is because these two men are black. Since they are black,
this must have something to do with racism. All other factors, elements or
facts are irrelevant and we do not need to wait for the whole story before we
act. This still went viral and it is worth looking at why.
A small group of people (activists, useful idiots, media)
are so desperate for a story about racism that they more than happy to be
willfully blind to alternative reasons as to why this happened.
They are okay with being willfully blind if it means they
can 1) feel good about themselves for ‘fighting racism’ (in the most lazy and
least risky way) 2) virtue signal about how not racist they are (me thinks the
lady doth protest too much) and 3) find meaning in destroying the lives of
others they judge as morally inferior (the employees are all racist so they
need to undergo unconscious bias training, the manager only asked them to leave
because he is racist not because they were trespassing and should be fired).
The truth is the demand for racists/racism far outstrips the
supply. When demand is significantly higher than supply that commodity becomes
more valuable. What is the value of racists/racism? It sells papers, it gets
clicks, and it gets people emotional.
Media Dust Up
The activists, mostly college educated to see racism and
sexism everywhere in everything (much like a fundamentalist religious person
will see their deity everywhere and in everything), act as outrage
manufacturers. They present their product, outrage, to the outrage merchants
(the mainstream media) in the hope that it will grow and become a household
name.
These outrage merchants can deliver their product directly
to your TV, computer or smart phone screen. They are not interested in truth,
rather they care about kicking your emotions so that you will pay attention to
them.
Currently outrage has never been more valuable, from the
outrage industry populated by activists and media elites, to the political
arena where outrage is being used as a club against political opponents.
Note: Yes there are justifiable reasons to be outraged but
this incident is not one of them. This outrage industry has a real world
impact.
Unconscious Bias
Training
The CEO of Starbucks Kevin Johnson said in an interview on
ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday
that he was going to have Starbucks employees undergo unconscious bias
training, as well as submit managers to additional training as when to call the
cops.
This seems like run of the mill training that most companies
undergo every year. I am sure most of us have gone through some sort of
training similar to this. So why does this matter?
First we have to understand the implications for this
training. The CEO of Starbucks is telling all of his 238,000 employees that
they are biased, and biased here means racist, and because of that bias they
must undergo training to eliminate it.
By the very act of participating you are admitting that you
are racist/biased. Most people will go to this training and nod along finding
it boring and will find they are not changed personally. But it only takes a
small minority to change the culture of a company.
With a few zealous employees driving the culture from the
bottom and informing to managers who will enforce company policy from the top,
those in the middle and on the bottom will either be forced out of a job (for
failure to conform) or will slide farther into the mindset put into place by
this training and its enforcement.
It was John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty who said “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the
individual is sovereign.” (Page 13). Your employer does not have the right to
meddle about in your unconscious, they do not own you, it is your mind and you
have a basic human right to freedom of thought and privacy. It is an invasion
of privacy of the highest order.
By imposing this training Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson might
as well be telling his employees, ‘your thoughts are wrong, allow me to
training you in what to think, you don’t want to be a racist now do you?’
If you work at Starbucks I would suggest you talk to your
coworkers and organize. Submit a statement concerning the training you are
being forced to undergo. If management ignores that, I would suggest you
protest by whatever non-violent means that would be most effective for your
particular location. If that is also ignored I would walkout on the day of the
training and find another job somewhere else.
