They can’t be blamed for making this mistake. While most African-American men sadly remain aware of the daily unease our presence causes in so many — the repositioning of a purse, the crossing of the street to avoid us, the extra look over the shoulder, etc., etc. — carrying that baggage around and having to be mindful of it sometimes creates a mental claustrophobia as stifling as a winter coat worn to a July 4 cookout.
Unfortunately for the men, they arrived at Starbucks just ahead of Andrew Yaffe, a white real estate developer who had planned to discuss a business opportunity with them. Disgusted by what he and others in the café watched unfold, Yaffe is seen on the now-viral video saying of the six arresting officers, “Does anybody else think this is ridiculous? It’s absolute discrimination.”
For Black men who have laughed that uneasy internal chuckle when confronted by that here-we-go-again nuanced bigotry that took place last Thursday — the nuance quickly goes away once police officers are introduced into the situation — we’re acutely aware that had Yaffe showed up first he would have brought with him, unknowingly perhaps, the “cover of whiteness.”
His mere presence would have likely in some strange way signaled to the low-minded manager who phoned the cops that Yaffe was in charge; that the swarthy interlopers who in her mind had no business inside a coffee shop in Rittenhouse Square were undoubtedly Yaffe’s subordinates; tame, even.
On Monday, rightfully so, Starbucks parted ways with the paranoid manager who called the cops to have the men extracted from the store after they would not leave once she told them they couldn’t use the restroom because they had not purchased anything.
In the manager’s defense, it is hard, if not impossible, to ascribe innocence to those who have never been given its presumption. For centuries, Black men like the two in the Starbucks, like their fathers, their grandfathers, and, if they have any, their sons will live under the crushing emotional and psychological weight of presumed guilt that no other American demographic has ever or will ever be forced to contend with.
So insidious is this mindset of guilty until proven innocent that it cheapens any attempt to place the high-profile deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, horrid as those tragedies are, in this context, for they are outliers. Death is not the outcome in the wide majority of incidents such as the one at Starbucks. However, the never-ending redundancy of bigotry and diminishment slowly devours the soul over the course of a lifetime.
It manifests in being profiled in a coffee store by someone with a smidgen of authority in a neighborhood where society says your kind aren’t supposed to be. It shows up in mostly white suburban school districts ramming Black boys into special education programs disproportionately, not giving a damn what imprint the stigma will leave on them, in order to meet state and federal funding quotas. It’s Philadelphia Federation of Police boss John McNesby characterizing mostly Black male protesters as “animals” for simply exercising their First Amendment rights. It was fed by George H.W. Bush’s despicable political fear-mongering use of Willie Horton to win the presidency in 1988; and it was found in Donald Trump’s election-year lie that Blacks were responsible for 81 percent of white homicides in 2015.
It is a series of straws, placed over generations, designed to break the camel’s back.
Starbucks is catching the heat for this latest collective slap in the face to the African-American community, but this incident at 18th and Spruce is just a smaller part of a much bigger problem. Starbucks has more than 27,000 stores worldwide; they just happened to hire the wrong person to oversee the operation at 18th and Spruce.
She’s gone. But the poison that led her to place that call is alive, well, and looking to manage people somewhere else.
About Post Author
