As an anti-racist educator, occasional coffee drinker and woman of color, I do not want to hear random members of the public who have not studied race share their uninformed opinions with or around me in the early morning hours.

Research on racial attitudes has demonstrated that there are wide swaths of the majority population who believe that talking about race at all is racist, that critiquing white people individually or collectively is inherently hateful and that racism is over (if it ever existed in the first place). Such ideas minimize or outright deny the existence of racial inequality and white supremacy in our society today. As philosopher Charles Mills explains, these forms of denial produce an "epistemology of ignorance"--a way of knowing and constructing the world built on a lack of knowledge about the social and political realities of race.

Yep-the flavor of that coffee is what those sexist toads in the old commercials were crabbing about!

Coffee is generally either medium roasted, dark roasted, or burned. (“Light roast” properly refers to a special German and Viennese roast that has little currency.) When coffee beans are medium roasted, the full range of their abundant and satisfying flavors is brought out. When coffee beans are dark roasted, they lose much of their subtle flavor but attain a deep richness that some enjoy, for example, in espresso. When coffee beans are burned, their refined flavor is destroyed. What remains is bitter and unpleasant.

Most fine coffee beans should be medium roasted. Junk beans are often burned, because, once you burn the beans, you can no longer tell what sort of quality they might have had if they had been properly roasted. The fact is, all burned beans taste the same: burned and bitter. Starbucks coffee is burned and bitter. You can tell when beans are burned because they take on a black color. We can only assume that Starbucks starts with the worst possible beans. After all, burning better beans is just a waste of money. Unfortunately, through the vagaries of marketing, not only has Starbucks become virtually omnipresent, but nearly every other coffee roaster has jumped on the burned bean band wagon. That is why, when you visit a shop selling a variety of whole coffee beans, most, if not all, of the beans have been burned black as hell.

In the ultimate coffee smackdown, it was yuppie Starbucks vs. Ronald McDonald and the Dunkin’ Kid. And the clown and the kid won!

Consumer Reports magazine said that in a test conducted at two locations of each emporium, its tasters found McDonald’s coffee to be “decent and moderately strong” with “no flaws.” On the other hand, the Starbucks brew “was strong, but burnt and bitter enough to make your eyes water instead of open.” The March, 2007 issue of the magazine, advises, “Try McDonald’s, which was cheapest and best.” Several other more recent blind taste tests have consistently rated Dunkin’ Donuts and MacDonald’s as the best tasting and Starbucks as the worst tasting coffee sampled.

Then, Crystal might wish to avoid DU.