A View From The American Left-Starbucks Arrested for Sitting While Black

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

Starbucks

Arrested for Sitting While Black

The online video of two black men in handcuffs being hauled out by police from a Starbucks in Philadelphia’s ritzy Rittenhouse Square neighborhood on April 12 has sparked widespread outrage. The video, taken by a white customer, illustrates what happens all the time to black people: shopping while black, sitting while black, driving while black—just being black puts you at risk in capitalist America. The Jim Crow laws mandating segregation have been overturned, but the normal workings of the capitalist system still keep the mass of black people forcibly suppressed and segregated.

The two men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, sat at a table in Starbucks to meet a business associate. When Nelson asked the manager to use the restroom, he was told that restrooms are for paying customers only. Within two minutes of their arrival, a manager called the cops. Charged with trespassing, Nelson and Robinson were thrown into a squad car, not read their rights and detained for nine hours before they were released. Afterward, Nelson said that he “wondered if he would make it home alive,” conscious of the fact that any encounter with the cops can turn deadly.

What happened at Starbucks is an atrocity but not an aberration. Black people are denied access to bathrooms while whites are given the entry code. Black people are told to get a move on after shelling out money for overpriced coffee while whites are allowed to linger at tables as long as they like. An appalled white customer present at the Philadelphia Starbucks said she had been there for hours; another stated that he had used the bathroom without purchasing anything. But in racist America, what is innocently “waiting” for whites is criminally “loitering” or “trespassing” for blacks. The charges of trespassing leveled against Nelson and Robinson echo the “Black Codes” and vagrancy laws implemented to oppress freed black people after the Civil War had smashed chattel slavery.

Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor Jim Kenney declared his town “a diverse city that is welcoming to all.” Really? Two-thirds of the stop-and-frisks by his cops in the posh Rittenhouse Square neighborhood are hits on black people, despite the fact that they constitute only 3 percent of the population. The “city of brotherly love” has always been a racist nightmare. A white mayor, Frank Rizzo, waged bloody war on the Black Panther Party. The 1982 frame-up conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost black political prisoner, was presided over by District Attorney Ed Rendell, who would later become mayor (and then Pennsylvania governor and a leading national figure in the Democratic Party). In 1985, black mayor Wilson Goode ordered that a bomb be dropped on the Philadelphia MOVE commune, killing eleven people, including five children, and burning a black neighborhood to the ground.

Just ten days after the assault on Nelson and Robinson at the Philadelphia Starbucks, another video went viral of cops viciously brutalizing Chikesia Clemons, a black woman, in an Alabama Waffle House. She had the audacity to object to paying extra for plastic utensils to eat her meal and asked to speak with the manager. The cops threw her to the ground in the middle of the restaurant, exposing her breasts. One cop threatened to break her arm while throttling her.

Twenty-five years ago, the Spartacist League and Labor Black Leagues, with support from integrated labor unions, initiated demonstrations around the country to protest outrageous racist policies at Denny’s restaurants against black and Latino diners. Recalling the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, the integrated groups of protesters, after picketing outside, went into Denny’s and demanded that the diner deliver equal services. Denny’s discrimination against black customers was so systematic that in 1994 the company was forced to pay millions after a class-action suit was filed.

While the South Carolina-based Denny’s made no effort to conceal its racism, the Seattle-based Starbucks hides behind a mask of liberalism, hypocritically selling itself as an urban oasis and a “progressive,” “socially responsible” enterprise. In a cheap publicity stunt to head off a backlash against their business and loss of profits, Starbucks announced plans to briefly close their stores on May 29 to carry out “unconscious bias” training of their employees.

Anti-bias training is the ubiquitous trendy policy of American liberals and a means by which the capitalist rulers wash their hands of endemic racist abuse by blaming it on the population. They posit that if people weren’t prejudiced, then there would be no racist incidents. This is fundamentally false. Prejudice is not the cause of discrimination but the product of American capitalism’s subjugation of black people as a race-color caste. Anti-black racism is the prime means used by the white ruling class to keep the multiracial working class divided. Rooted in chattel slavery, black oppression forms the bedrock of American capitalism and is maintained through force and violence by the capitalist state’s cops and prison system. As veteran Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser noted in a 1953 lecture, “Only the destruction of the economic and social foundation upon which prejudice is built will eliminate it” (“In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990).

Among those whom Starbucks is commissioning to help in its “unconscious bias” training workshop is former top cop for the Obama administration, Eric Holder, who protected cops as they gunned down black people and led the assault on whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning. Starbucks sparked further outrage when it also engaged the notoriously racist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for “anti-bias” training. For more than 50 years, the ADL has violence-baited anti-fascist protesters and spied on black activists, Palestinian rights activists, labor unions, leftists and others for the FBI, CIA, the Israeli Mossad, apartheid South Africa and Latin American death squad regimes. It might as well have hired Steve Bannon. In response to the backlash, Starbucks now claims that it will only “consult” the ADL.

While it accrues profits to the tune of millions on the backs of an overworked workforce, Starbucks pays poverty-level wages that average nine to ten dollars an hour. The company claims it offers workers decent health insurance, but in fact fewer than 42 percent of Starbucks baristas are insured by the company. In 2008, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Starbucks had broken the law by firing union organizers and prohibiting employees from even talking union. The Industrial Workers of the World have fought Starbucks’ nationally coordinated anti-union operation and organized a handful of shops. But the majority remain unorganized and many workers endure the torment of “clopening”—i.e., closing down the store late at night, commuting home and returning back just a few hours later to open for the morning shift. What’s needed is a hard class-struggle fight to organize Starbucks and other companies in the service industry. This perspective requires a political struggle against the current union tops, who shackle the labor movement to the capitalist Democratic Party.

As Marxists fighting to build a workers party that will act as the tribune of the people, we oppose every manifestation of oppression. Our strategy is to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement. We underline that full equality for black people requires a revolution where the working class rips the economy out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and reorganizes it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to lay the basis for eliminating the material roots of black oppression through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivized economy with jobs and quality housing, health care and education for all.