Starbucks Fails Racial Equity Test

And third, to reassure you that Starbucks stands firmly against discrimination or racial profiling.

In the coming days, I will be joining our regional vice president, Camille Hymes—who is on the ground in Philadelphia—to speak with partners, customers and community leaders as well as law enforcement. Most importantly, I hope to meet personally with the two men who were arrested to offer a face-to-face apology.

We have immediately begun a thorough investigation of our practices. In addition to our own review, we will work with outside experts and community leaders to understand and adopt best practices. The video shot by customers is very hard to watch and the actions in it are not representative of our Starbucks Mission and Values. Creating an environment that is both safe and welcoming for everyone is paramount for every store. Regretfully, our practices and training led to a bad outcome—the basis for the call to the Philadelphia police department was wrong. Our store manager never intended for these men to be arrested and this should never have escalated as it did.

We also will further train our partners to better know when police assistance is warranted. Additionally, we will host a company-wide meeting next week to share our learnings, discuss some immediate next steps and underscore our long-standing commitment to treating one another with respect and dignity. I know our store managers and partners work hard to exceed our customers’ expectations every day—which makes this very poor reflection on our company all the more painful.

Finally, to our partners who proudly wear the green apron and to customers who come to us for a sense of community every day: You can and should expect more from us. We will learn from this and be better.

Respectfully,

Kevin Johnson

But here’s the thing. As well intentioned and sincere the CEO may be, and I have no reason to doubt his intentions, he offers nothing that would lead a black person to believe that these actions will result in a significant change in the behavior of Starbucks employees.

He talks about training the employees and working with outside experts and community leaders to understand and adopt best practices. At issue here is that this approach has been employed for decades by a countless number of organizations, yet both empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that this country hasn’t made significant progress in the area of racial discrimination since the civil rights movement. This is made clear in a report published by the Pew Research Center.

One of the problems is that we seem to treat “training” as the panacea for our racial equity crisis. One of my favorite articles on the topic is found in a blog called Fakequity.com. In it, writer Heidi Schillinger argues that many mainstream organizations are approaching “training” as the destination for their racial equity work. I found this to be true in my 20-plus year career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When it came to diversity and inclusion, training was treated as if it were the end game. In other words, assuming that racial inequity is what drives the need for training, then it would follow that the desired outcome would be racial equity.

So, if the goal is to achieve racial equity, it would then follow that the organization would institute a method of measuring the effectiveness of the training and a method of changing the course of action if it found that the remedy/training was not achieving the goal. But in all of the years I worked there, diversity training was conducted as if the act of implementing a training program itself was all the powers that be required—nothing more. Measuring outcomes wasn’t part of the deal. The box was checked when the training was implemented. The issue wouldn’t be revisited until the same time the next year when they’d do another “training”.

Heidi Schillinger at Fakequity.com acknowledges the need for training, but she includes some additional efforts that could help organizations truly seeking to achieve racial equity to make real progress. They include: