The Long Tail

The arrest of two Black men who were waiting for a friend in a Starbucks in an upscale neighborhood of Philadelphia, and the reaction to said event, seems somewhat overblown all the way around. But it reminds me of something that I learned some time ago, and that I do my best to remember:

For any single interaction, the difference between a racist and an asshole is negligible.

And yeah, some people are just assholes. It's not that I think that any incident that we are tempted to attribute to racism should automatically be chalked up to being an asshole instead. But if we think that any instance where a White person behaves badly to a Black person is evidence that the United States hasn't shed its White supremacist past, then that past will never be shed, because there will always be assholes.

The most enduring legacy of racism and other prejudices is the expectation of racism and other prejudices because of the perfectly reasonable understanding that a truly harmonious and equal society isn't built in a day. And so if there was racism yesterday. it's likely that there is racism today. And the vigilance with which many people are taught to bring to the search for racism means that it will always be found, especially because any single negative interaction between people of different races can be chalked up to bias, and once that verdict is handed down, nothing else matters.

In other words, asking the question: "How many other people were thrown out of that Starbucks location?" is important. Not because it allows for the opportunity to exonerate the manager, but because it allows us to make a determination of a broader pattern, and to see the place of this one incident within it, and to genuinely understand if we're looking at a racist, or an asshole.

While Starbucks is garnering some praise, and some criticism, for closing every company-owned store for an afternoon for anti-bias training, if the manager in question was simply an asshole, a lot of people have been tarred. A good end may come from that tarring, but there are better ways to get there, than what is basically an act of public self-flagellation on the part of Starbucks.