Last month, after two men were asked to leave a Philadelphia Starbucks on the grounds that they were loitering, the Starbucks Corporation announced that it would close more than 8,000 stores for a day in order to impose “unconscious bias training” on its employees. (Readers contemplating the wisdom or scientific soundness of this “training” will wish to consult Andrew Ferguson’s essay elsewhere in these pages.) The grievance industry’s response to Starbucks’s announcement was about as predictable as a caffeine buzz after a redeye: The company’s decision is okay, the activist community concluded, but it doesn’t go far enough.
One wonders how long and piteously the coffee company would have to grovel in order to satisfy, say, Henry Louis Gates or Ta-Nehisi Coates. At least one response, though, did catch our attention, that of Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. His idea? Mandatory unconscious bias training for all public officials.
“We commend Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson for his deliberate speed in taking steps that many a Fortune 500 company would fear,” writes Johnson in a USA Today op-ed. “At the same time, we ask why is our society continually placing training on unconscious and implicit bias into a red box that says ‘break only in case of emergency,’ when we know it’s just a matter of time before another incident is caught on video and made public?”
We’re not totally sure what this metaphorical red box is supposed to signify, but we’re willing to learn. But Johnson goes on to explain that “America still grapples with the intense labor pains necessary for giving birth to an ever elusive colorblind society” and that “implicit bias” is “like stagnant water polluting the American ideals of justice and meritocracy”; and the whole thing is “a conundrum wrapped inside a ball of hate, explicit bias, racism, micro-aggressions and subconscious fears that can only be unraveled through our nation staring down face to face its problem with racism.” So America’s giving birth in polluted water and trying to unravel a ball of hate instead by putting bias training in an emergency box . . . Got it.
As for mandatory bias training for all public officials, we disagree: Our public officials are confused enough.
