Black Coffee, White Guilt

At the risk of sounding like the unfashionable cheapskate old fogies that we are, we confess we have never once patronized a Starbucks coffee shop. Instead we brew our two essential cups of morning coffee with a teapot and one of those conical things with the paper filter and two spoonfuls from a can of the local supermarket’s most inexpensive ground, and in the happy solitude of our kitchen table we savor its bitter taste and stimulating effects at a fraction of the price and without any conversation about race.

The conversation about race apparently now comes with the high price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks, according to press reports. It seems the 60-something white guy who runs the company has lately been concerned about the state of race relations in America and therefore instructed the “baristas” at his company’s store to engage the customers in heartfelt chit-chat about that “police shooting of an unarmed black teenager” and the rest of America’s racist sins. We put “barista” in quotation marks because it strikes us as such a highfalutin term for a coffee-slinger, and “police shooting of an unarmed black teenager” in quotation marks because he’s talking about such a clear-cut case of self-defense that even The Washington Post’s most exquisitely racially sensitive writer now admits it, but the press reports treat this cacophony as everyday language. They further note that the Starbucks “baristas” are writing some “hashtag” on the coffee cups with “Sharpies,” which is also apparently common parlance, and all the more reason to retreat to the solitude of our kitchen table.

At least the reports also indicate that Starbucks’ new policy has already met with widespread disdain. Many people have been “tweeting,” another one of those damnable neologisms requiring quotation marks, that the policy is patronizing toward minorities and insufficiently groveling toward the most up-to-date racial sensitivities. One widely “re-tweeted” “tweet” showed a smilingly caucasian waitress and the caption “Let’s discuss the disenfranchisement of your people that has allowed me to prosper.” Another offered “May I have a latte and an explanation for why your people continue to plunder my country.” Yet another suggested that the “hashtag” campaign “is what happens when a 1%-er without any actual anti-racist education or training has mid-life ‘white man’s burden’ crisis.” We wonder how the disenfranchisement of anybody has allowed Starbucks’ relatively meagerly paid waitresses to prosper, and we’re not at all sure what countries the corporation is plundering, but we do rather like the line about the executive’s mid-life “white man’s burden” crisis. If such more-progressive-than-thou self-righteousness is what it takes to force Starbucks’ retreat, we’re all for it.

The right doesn’t seem to be “tweeting” about it so much, presumably because they abhor the newness of the medium and brew their own coffee at home, but we’re also sympathetic to its largely unstated complaint that the even trendiest yuppie on his way to a multi-cultural sensitivity training session should be able to buy a cup of joe without having to hear some queer studies or gender studies or something or another studies graduate yammering on about race and class and gender and oppression and corporations and the rest of that nonsense they racked up $40,000 of debt learning about to get a job as a “barista” at Starbucks. That conversation Starbucks is hoping to provoke will involve the customer apologizing for his skin tone and that cop defending his life and getting absolution as part of the steep price of a cup of coffee, and somebody should object to that.

Besides, the formerly simple task of ordering a cup of java is time-consuming enough these days. After all the rigmarole about cream and sugar and foam and double mocha and beans from a certain region of Columbia and all the rest of it, adding in a discussion of the past 400 years of racial relations will make you late for that multi-cultural sensitivity training session.

— Bud Norman

An Ink-Stained Wretch

Even by the melodramatic standards of newsroom intrigue, the latest dust-up at The New York Times is noteworthy for its nastiness. The acrimonious departure of executive managing editor Jill Abramson features accusations of sexism, a plea of poverty, and an intriguing tale of an ill-advised tattoo.

Abramson was installed as editor of the Times in 2011 amid much self-congratulatory hoopla about her being the first woman to hold that once-prestigious position, but was replaced on Thursday by former deputy Dean Baquet, who was introduced at a news conference where Abramson was conspicuously absent, and with much self-congratulatory hoopla as the first African-American to hold the once-prestigious post. The past three years of newspaper gossip have chronicled Abramson’s frequent clashes with both the staff below her and the family heir owner above her, but according to the insiders at The New Yorker the final conflict occurred when Abramson discovered that she was being paid less than her predecessor and concluded that sexism was the reason. The accusation is so embarrassing to the Times, which has crusaded relentlessly and often embarrassingly against real and imaginary sexism in other corner of American life, that it responded with a frank admission that its bottom line no longer allows for the generous compensation it once offered to the editors who oversee its precipitous decline in readership and ad revenues. Our occasional freelance work for the Times has not brought us anywhere near contact with Abramson, so we cannot attest to the veracity of any claims about her difficult nature, which of course have also led to accusations of sexism, but our long experience of the newspaper business suggests that the economic explanations are quite plausible.

In any case, we were more struck by the odd detail in the International Business Times that Abramson had celebrated her editorship by getting the modified serif font “T” from the Times’ distinctive masthead tattooed onto some undisclosed location on her body. The 60-year-old Abramson spoke of the tattoo last month on a podcast interview, and said she also had three others that included a representation of a New York City subway token and the trademark “H” of Harvard University to honor both her alma mater and the husband she met there, leaving listeners to speculate what the fourth tattoo looks like. We’re hoping it’s a big red “Mom” or a likeness of Betty Page, but we suppose that even in this day and age she’s entitled to some privacy regarding the matter. So long as she’s willing to speak of the modified serif “T” we’ll avail ourselves of a chuckle about it, though, as it reminds us of a heavily-tatooed friend of ours who is forever adorned with the name of an ex-husband on one of her formidable biceps. Abramson is still married to her Harvard beau, they’ll never take that degree away her from, and one can only hope that subway token will always retain its meaning for her, but that modified serif “T” is likely to be a painful reminder of lost love.

Even more painful to contemplate is what that tattoo says about both The Times and the times. Back when the Gray Lady was The Newspaper of Record and would settle a bet in almost any barroom in America, its editors did not have tattoos. They countenanced the likes of Walter Duranty whitewashing Stalin’s mass murders and Daniel Ellsberg’s espionage and Jayson Blair’s affirmative action fabrications and countless never-mind corrections, but at least they were serious enough they weren’t sitting next in line to some trendy twenty-something co-ed at the local tattoo parlor. It is saddening but no longer surprising to learn that someone so high in the still-influential world of journalism is trying to keep up with the teenaged hipsters, as the age of the grown-up has clearly passed. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial rightly bemoaned the “selfie-taking, hashtagging” administration, where National Security Council members dismiss the Benghazi scandal by saying “Dude, that was, like, two years ago,” and the President of the United States is doing late night comedy bits with the hippest hosts and denouncing the opposition party’s proposals as a “stinkburger,” so it should be expected that those covering their reign with proper respect have a similar sense of style. This might not have anything to do with the rapid decline of the newspaper industry or the similarly rapid decline of the country, but it seems an interesting coincidence.

— Bud Norman