On #RaceTogether and conversations we don’t have

Earlier this week, Starbucks—in a misguided PR stunt—announced that it would direct its employees to initiate conversations on race with customers.

The company received much derision for this initiative. It seemed less of an honest effort to engender difficult conversations than as a way to make the company look good to its core clientele. And the idea of forcing $8/hr baristas to initiate fraught conversations with people who might either not be receptive or violently hostile had an air of feudal lords imposing extra work on their serfs.

If Starbucks were truly interested in starting discussions on race, one place to start would be why its executive positions are staffed mostly by whites.

However, the hamhandedness of #RaceTogether does bring up one glaring point: We ignore the elephant in the room.

The election of Barack Obama gave too many of us the self-satisfaction that we were beyond racial animus. “Hey, we elected a black guy!” All throughout the 2008 campaign, as Sen. Obama marched to the nomination, and then the Presidency, I had one name in the back of my mind: David Dinkins.

Mr. Dinkins was the first black mayor of New York City. And he was torn down in such a fashion by political opponents, with barely-concealed racial overtones, that it led to Rudy Giuliani sweeping in and defeating him in the subsequent mayoral election. My greatest fear for President-elect Obama was that he would be Dinkinized, made to look an affirmative action hire, not up to the job.

Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now: that Pres. Obama is in fact a singular individual. His opposition has in fact tried to Dinkinize him, but has failed spectacularly. The Obama caricature does not jibe with the Obama reality. New York’s first black mayor was run out on the rails. America’s first black president won re-election handily.

But, far from heralding the end of the race question, Pres. Obama’s tenure in office has ejected it out into the open. Peruse any of the more salient parts of the right wing blogosphere and criticism of Pres. Obama is almost always based on race. That criticism then extends to African Americans as a whole. The President’s election hasn’t heightened racial animus; it just brought it out of its hole, as racial bigotry merged with the traditional American distrust of the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to forge a whirlwind of racial demagoguery.

The conversations on race which this country desperately need shouldn’t be instigated by underpaid coffee house employees. Those conversations should begin around the kitchen table of a white family whose paterfamilias drops casual racist comments. They should take place on the comment boards of the right wing blogs, where opposition to a disliked President (which is traditional American orneriness) transmutes by the philosopher’s stone into a miasma of racial hatred and resentment. They need to happen in editorial rooms, where a black unarmed teenager is described as life-threatening and deserving to be shot down in the street, but a white skinhead on a murder spree is captured alive and without incident and not painted as a terrorist.

There are many painful conversations we have to have in this country. Expecting a poorly-paid employee to engage in them as part of his job is indicative of the unseriousness with which we treat this need. If Starbucks had been genuine in fostering such conversations, its executive officers should have visited churches, both black and white, and speak to the noxious racial atmosphere prevalent in this country. It should have lobbied Congress to fix the Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court. It should have promoted people of color to executive positions within its company. It should have done many things besides engage in limp public relations.

The need for honest conversations about race is great. The solutions being offered so far are less than useless, but actively harmful.

http://theobamadiary.com/2015/03/20/on-racetogether-and-conversations-we-dont-have/#more-199513