Coffee retailing giant Starbucks is getting an earful of outrage and ridicule over its "Race Together" campaign. Its intent, according to chain CEO Howard Schultz, in a joint interview with USA Today's Larry Kramer, is to do something about what he claims is "the divisive role unconscious bias plays in our society and the role empathy can play to bridge those divides."
USAT's Kramer claims that its interest arose because, "while covering those dramatic news stories in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City, among others, we committed to telling the story of the changing face of America."
In other words, the outside-funded "activist groups" behind the protests and violence tied to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in those two cities have succeeded in brainwashing two large and influential institutions, including a media behemoth which is supposedly pledged to objectivity and fairness in its journalistic endeavors, into what may be the largest, most visible and most embarrassing exercise in white guilt ever undertaken.
Much of the recent outrage over the Starbucks-USA Today joint effort — USA Today really must be seen as an equal partner here — has focused on this "How many people of different races do you know?" questionnaire:
The questionnaire wraps with these three questions, the first of which is designed to disparage ancestors, and the second of which seeks to build on the guilt the ten fill-in-the-blank items above attempted to induce:
As to the final question, maybe some good will come out of all of this if the vast majority of those exposed to it push back by answering as follows: "America's greatest race challenge is ending its obsession over race, and moving towards a society where people are judged, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned, not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character."
Even hardened leftists are recoiling at the Starbucks-USAT effort. As the New York Times reported on Wednesday:
Gwen Ifill, the co-anchor of “PBS NewsHour,” wrote in a tweet on Tuesday: “Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well.”
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of all of this is Starbucks CEO Schultz's insistence that "Our intentions are pure." Maybe his are, but what has resulted from his intentions isn't. USA Today's involvement in those results casts doubt on its ability to ever credibly cover a story with a racial element again.
I'll have more on that in a post this evening.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
