The campaign is the joint project of Starbucks and USA Today: Race Together. I've been in Starbucks pretty frequently recently and noticed the white on black stickers people can ask to put on their cups. The coffee chain was taking ome heat for the move, I'd read.
But when I saw the insert today in the newspaper, quizzes, history, projections, it seemed the two companies had struck the right note, focusing demographics and experience rather than rhetoric.
l said as much to the young high school senior (he seemed to me) behind the counter who said he thought so as well but that he took issue with the whole notion of race of a meaningful category of classification. Class is the really important distinction between people. Race, he said, is just a way of thinking which can disappear if we change the way we think.
I made some remarks about the challenge of changing the way people think, and then left, coffee in hand. I thought, though, as I walked through the door: young man, that's just a little too neat. To substitute class consciousness for race suggests that it's peoples' behavior or mindset, what they do, that we respond to, not what we project on them, attributions that, in the social realm create what they conceives and perceptions trump even genetics.
I know you think a change of language Would simply, even eliminate, the problem, but there's no way short of full open-eyed dialogue that won't be glib or ignore
history or buffer us from change.
The RT campaign provides some useful tools for starting conversation within and between groups. Good job.
But when I saw the insert today in the newspaper, quizzes, history, projections, it seemed the two companies had struck the right note, focusing demographics and experience rather than rhetoric.
l said as much to the young high school senior (he seemed to me) behind the counter who said he thought so as well but that he took issue with the whole notion of race of a meaningful category of classification. Class is the really important distinction between people. Race, he said, is just a way of thinking which can disappear if we change the way we think.
I made some remarks about the challenge of changing the way people think, and then left, coffee in hand. I thought, though, as I walked through the door: young man, that's just a little too neat. To substitute class consciousness for race suggests that it's peoples' behavior or mindset, what they do, that we respond to, not what we project on them, attributions that, in the social realm create what they conceives and perceptions trump even genetics.
I know you think a change of language Would simply, even eliminate, the problem, but there's no way short of full open-eyed dialogue that won't be glib or ignore
history or buffer us from change.
The RT campaign provides some useful tools for starting conversation within and between groups. Good job.
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