The cops didn’t just show up at the Starbucks in Philly to remove the two black men.
Employees of color who attended the highly-publicized “unconscious bias training” for Starbucks employees on Tuesday have reported it was more of a lesson on police brutality than anything else.
Starbucks closed 8,000 stores for several hours on May 30 to facilitate seminars for its employees after the coffee shop was at the forefront of a racial controversy in April.
“It felt like we were off task the entire time because we didn’t reflect on the situation itself,” a black 18-year-old Starbucks employee called “Tina” told Philadelphia Magazine.
“The training materials focused a lot on police brutality, which had nothing to do with the incident that happened,” Tina said.
She was referring to the incident that occurred at a Philadelphia Starbucks on April 12 when two black men were arrested for trespassing after employees called the police because they hadn’t purchased anything and refused to leave.
On that occasion, despite the controversy that surrounded their ejection from the coffee shop, no force was used to remove the men, and there have been zero allegations of police brutality.
In fact, the Philadelphia police commissioner instituted a new policy after they incident that required Starbucks employees to address company policy and commit to pressing charges before officers will make an arrest in one of their stores.
But employees claimed the training seminar was mostly a waste of time.
“I was really disappointed when I walked out of there because I was expecting so much more,” Tina said.
Another employee that Philadelphia Magazine called “Jamie” said that the Starbucks representative running the session he attended did not even address the incident that had spawned the bias training. He said nobody talked about it unless somebody asked a specific question.
Instead of discussing the incident, participants were asked to complete a journal with questions about their feelings about their own race. They were also asked about their natural hair and how often friends of different races visited their homes.
HT: Blue Sky