As Starbucks backs away from its Race Together campaign, Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune writes:
First McDonald's advertised that people working the register would be urging us to make sure our relationships with our loved ones were on solid footing. Then Starbucks asked its baristas to engage us on racial issues in a bid to patch up America's great divide.
Affection and racial harmony aren't the issue here. We are pro affection and racial harmony. No one is arguing against loving and caring for our fellow humans, but we came in to feed our faces, not our souls. A lot of us just want to get what we ordered and go.
That's not running away from serious issues. It's wariness about being drawn into a major corporation's marketing campaign through a discussion about an important but sensitive subject with someone we barely know.
Read Rosenthal's full piece here.