Starbucks Starts Campaign to Discuss Racism
SEATTLE, March 17 (UPI) — Starbucks has launched a campaign to start a conversation about racism in the United States.
The Race Together campaign, kicked off by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, will involve baristas at 12,000 locations writing the words “Race Together” on customers’ cups to encourage a dialogue about race.
Despite raw emotion around racial unrest from Ferguson, Missouri to New York City to Oakland, “we at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America,” Schultz told employees in Seattle. “Not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are.”
Starbucks partnered with USA Today on the project which will publish a supplement March 20 featuring “conversation starters” including fill-in-the-blank sentences like “In the past year, I have been to the home of someone of a different race ___ times.”
The campaign has generated a good amount of cynicism on social media with people using the #RaceTogether to tweet their criticisms.
