Not much I can say would add clarity or fresh insight to the drawbacks of the Race Together campaign recently unveiled by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz. Apart from the inevitable #TwitterBacklash™, negative reactions have been covered by The Nation, ThinkProgress, NPR, Salon, National Review, and Breitbart. If the enthusiasm displayed for this campaign thus far is any indicator, Race Together will not make it out of the starting gate. (Sorry.) For all the reasons put forth by the aforementioned sources, plus a few others not particularly worthy of mention (up to and including a thread of misanthropy welded to my skeletal structure), I suspect that this initiative will indeed fail, and perhaps it should. At the same time, any initiative that unites such a diversity of political groups in common cause against an enemy might be worth considering from a contrary perspective.
Grad students (current and former) who recall Jurgen Habermas from their humanities lit theory courses, or those who have stumbled across DeWitt and Steele know that, at one point, the coffeehouse was an important site of political socialization in Europe. Customers would gather in coffeehouses to read and discuss the news of the day, often printed on broadsides along with editorial commentary. Those with the means to spend time engaging in such activities were able to develop and cultivate political attitudes and opinions, shaping in a very active way their contemporary culture. Pubs and beer halls performed similar functions, and still do in some neighborhoods, existing as sites where the opinion of the people is often aired, checked, and/or calibrated.
I don’t deny that there may be a certain amount of incongruity in the notion of a plutocrat treating his massive chain of stores as a nebulously populist political rudder in the tempestuous currents of American culture. And the nebulousness of the initiative certainly smacks of “do-something-ism,” which is a peculiar psychological condition that compels otherwise levelheaded people to act rashly out of the irrational conviction that whatever happens if they perform some action, the consequences of not doing anything must be immeasurably worse. It may even be terribly unseemly to expect employees to do the work of performing “politicality” as part of their jobs (even if they’re not required to do so, the expectation remains). But employees already are political. They are people first and citizens second. If Schultz is to be taken at his word, Race Together is a chance for employees to talk about something that is important to them personally and civically.
While I’m sympathetic to the criticism of neoliberalism that it converts every aspect of our lives into exploitable labor, up to and including our political opinions, if Schultz is as good as his word, this presents a legitimate opportunity for engaged citizens to convert mere business transactions into politically fraught engagements. Plenty of people have already weighed in to say that this is a bad thing—because it’s shallow, because it could invite escalation, because it will drive away business, because it will achieve nothing. They may be right. I know plenty of people who would hate to go to a coffee shop and have a barista engage in a discussion about race or any of those reasons.
Then again, there are customers like me. I personally find it intriguing that I might walk into a coffee shop and have the barista ask for my opinion on the topos du jour. I’m fully capable of choosing whether or not to engage in political discussion, and I’m capable of expressing myself in such a way as to minimally offend any reasonably receptive conversation partner. As someone who has worked on that side of the counter, I also know that the people serving me are not just service employees, but people—people with full lives and perspectives of their own. (I would know this anyway, but empathy gained from experience makes it so much more meaningful.) The golden rule of the service economy is not “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but “The customer is always right.” Even if that customer is blathering on and on within earshot in a way that you personally find to be highly offensive, you, the employee, must smile and ask if there is anything else you can do to make them happy. It may very well shock many customers that their servers have political views very different from their own. What I suspect may be even more shocking than a difference in political viewpoints is the notion that employees have political viewpoints to articulate, and that these viewpoints matter to them very deeply. Employees are not just facilitators of economic transactions. A potential benefit to Race Together is that some customers might be reminded that the people making them their lattes are fellow citizens.
I don’t have any illusions that Race Together will resurrect the glory days of the coffeehouse as a center of the public sphere. I’ll freely admit that I have a romantic nostalgia for a that whole scene, even though it came and went a long time before I was born. And I certainly don’t think that the nature of the Starbucks workflow will facilitate deep conversations about current issues. What I appreciate, though, is the gesture, and it is a gesture that—wittingly or not—has deep roots in the origins of what we now think of as liberal democracy. This particular gesture has romantic appeal to me for reasons beyond the idea that employees and customers shouldn’t have to check their politics aside before entering into a relationship defined entirely by unequal economic exchange.
In my experience, it is very difficult to enter into political discussions with people—especially strangers. Depending on the personalities involved, politics at the family dinner table can be anywhere from vigorously diverting to total meltdown of Chernobyl proportions. In your workplace, such discussions are dangerous because you can’t risk endangering your job by offending fellow employees or your boss. (“Hostile work environment,” anyone?) In the conventional arenas of the public sphere, your options are similarly limited. You can gather for protests or organize for a cause, but then most of the people you encounter will be likeminded. To discuss politics with mere acquaintances or outright strangers, the venues of choice are now most frequently social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. (And to venture into the comment threads on AP news stories is not unlike venturing along with Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch on a fantastic voyage, if the voyage is inside the sled dog from John Carpenter’s The Thing.) What is missing is a socially conventional forum in which it is not only common but expected to engage in civil discussion face to face with fellow citizens about contemporary political issues.
Though it is unlikely that Starbucks is offering a return to this mythical coffeehouse of the public sphere, I would like to believe that there are folks out there who would welcome the opportunity, if provided, to meet and engage in such discussions in this fashion. It seems to me that Schultz is (perhaps clumsily) responded to this desire. The fact that so many people have responded with varying levels of disdain, outrage, derision, exasperation, or apathy is dispiriting to me. It suggests that what I think of as a civic public sphere may actually be dead, and that the next generation truly is condemned to the self-selecting formation of in-groups and echo chambers which social media and polarized political theater portend.* But if there are enough people like Howard Schultz—and I don’t mean well-meaning plutocrats, but concerned citizens who choose not to see political opponents as enemies—then perhaps the romantic ideal of the coffeehouse tradition can be salvaged as a better model for what political discussion—and dissension—could be.
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Miles from Knowhere 