Anti-white value-signaling can be expensive. Starbucks, famous for overpriced coffee and overwrought woke attitudes, just discovered this after the company was ordered to pay $25.6 million in damages to a white employee it fired because of her race.
The woman, ex-regional manager Shannon Phillips, was scapegoated after a high-profile 2018 incident in which two black men were arrested for loitering at a Philadelphia Starbucks and refusing to leave when asked. But while commentator Christopher Tremoglie writes that the company now “learns that anti-white discrimination doesn’t pay,” will Starbucks really change its ways? Will corporate America in general?
Recent history is not encouraging. CNN, The Washington Post, and NBC Universal were forced to pay presumably large settlements to white ex-Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann after defaming him over a 2019 interaction with an American Indian activist, yet has their woke tone changed one iota?
A white healthcare executive named David Duvall was awarded $10 million in 2021 in a discrimination lawsuit against Novant Health, and a court ruled last year that a white ex-AT&T vice president’s racial discrimination suit against his former employer could move forward. Yet have these stories and others like them moved the needle at all?
Note that just last November, a poll found that one out of six hiring managers was told to not take on white males. Companies will still embrace programs such as one at Bank of America, which involved telling “white employees in particular” to “cede power to people of color.” And it’s still fashionable to say publicly, as late OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush did, that you prefer not to hire “50-year-old White guys.” Saying you won’t hire any kind of “black guys” would be career-ending, of course.
Returning to the aforementioned Tremoglie, he writes that some years ago he was asked to leave a Philadelphia Starbucks because he hadn’t bought anything (he had time to kill) and the store was “for customers.” This happened shortly before the aforementioned Starbucks incident, in which the “two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, were asked to leave for the same reason I was and were arrested when they refused,” he explained.
“When it was requested that Nelson and Robinson stop loitering, it was because of racism; when I was asked to leave, it was because of Starbucks’s policy,” Tremoglie continued. “Their incident caused national outrage, whereas I couldn’t pay anyone in the media to report about mine. It was yet another example of the toxic double standard on race that exists in the country.”
What’s more, Nelson and Robinson received a monetary settlement from Starbucks (a bit like having to pay an award because you punched someone in his fist with your face), and Philadelphia responded by promising to establish a $200,000 program for young entrepreneurs.
Now, it might appear that Nelson, Robinson, and their enablers believe a person should be allowed to use another individual’s property rent-free, taking up space a paying customer may need or want. But this isn’t exactly the case.
The pseudo-elites would never trouble over whites, such as Tremoglie, being ejected from any establishment. This concerns prejudice, not principle; agendas, not anger most righteous. While Nelson and Robinson, perhaps being racially paranoid, might’ve read bigoted intent into an experience reflecting a standard applied to everyone, the people driving these racial agendas are very easy to understand: They care nothing about Truth.
The cultural wind is at their backs, though. For it’s not just that anti-white discrimination/prejudice isn’t punished; it’s also profitable. Uneducated race hustlers such as Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers; famous for 2020’s Antiracist Baby), Nikole Hannah-Jones (the revisionist 1619 Project), and Robin DiAngelo (2018’s White Fragility) are fêted by pseudo-elites and make many millions peddling anti-white propaganda. Kendi, in fact, actually “insists that the only way to fight racism is to embrace [anti-white] racial discrimination in perpetuity,” as Professor Lynn Uzzell put it at RealClearPolitics in 2021.
Don’t call his proposition “racist,” though — the definition has been changed. “According to the new eighth-grade curriculum for the Albemarle County (Va.) School District, racism now means: ‘The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people,’” relates Uzzell. Under this definition, prevalent in pseudo-elite circles, “only people of color may be victimized, and only ‘white people’ may marginalize or oppress,” the professor adds.
Moreover, under this theory, “racism” is based “on an inescapable ‘socially constructed racial hierarchy’ that always ‘privileges white people,’” Uzzell also relates — “it means that white people are engaging in racism simply by being white.”
The point is this: A Starbucks-like payout every now and again changes little (if anything) because it bumps up against something every time has: a spirit of the age. Ours, nurtured by pseudo-elites, is inherently anti-white. It’s everywhere, like the air we breathe.
So when companies do their instinctive cost-benefit analysis, the occasional payout is inconsequential compared to politically correct benefits such as friendly media treatment, the receipt of woke capital, cocktail-party-circuit acceptance, immunity to fed scrutiny and EEOC lawsuits, and career security. This won’t change, either, until the age’s spirit does.
But one thing is changing. Many, many years ago, when I complained about anti-white prejudice to a local Democratic politician in a private conversation, he leaned slightly toward me and responded in a hushed tone, “The problem is that white people don’t vote as a bloc.”
(Translation: He didn’t really care about the PC values he publicly espoused. It was all about politics.)
Will this continue, however? Uzzell writes that in “addition to the ubiquity of the evil itself, this racism is bound to provoke a backlash.” The more that white citizens “perceive themselves as under attack, the more likely they will be to coalesce politically as a form of defense,” she continues. “Hence, it is predictable that we would find … undercurrents of white identity politics at the polls and, at the fringes, a rise in white supremacy and white nationalism.”
Not that this will, here and now, stop the pseudo-elites’ anti-white agenda. They’re playing a game of divide-and-conquer. The question is, will they conquer — or be conquered?
