This is what kicking the (coffee) can down the road looks like.

In response to the racial profiling, harassment, humiliation and discrimination incident at one of their Philadelphia stores last month, Starbucks has changed its policy to allow anyone, whether or not they’ve made a purchase, to use the bathroom at Starbucks. 

Which is not the point. 

What happened isn’t about bathroom access. It’s about racial bias leading to racist consequences that will just find the next opportunity to rear its head, if not in denying a request to use the bathroom, then in disapproving of the way someone else smells. Or in not tolerating their simply occupying space near you. And yes, in all three of these incidents, white people called the police on black people. This isn’t to say this is only about white people’s bias against black people, but the phenomenon and underlying issue is certainly, persistently and significantly inclusive of white people’s bias against black people.

My issue with this “open bathroom” announcement is that it (toilet) papers over the real issue, allowing Starbucks to think it’s addressing racial bias, when it’s really just removing one of the more public ways racial bias in its culture (and yes, broader US culture) may manifest.

What’s worse, now anyone who disagrees with the open restroom policy (fearing, perhaps, an influx of whomever they’ve come to expect Starbucks will call the police on) can blame it on black people, as if racial inclusion and equity are wreaking havoc on society.

(Which, actually, they should—at least on those aspects of society that are unfair, denigrating and divisive.) 

But we can’t advance equity and inclusion by eliminating people’s everyday opportunities and responsibilities to practice them. What’s next for Starbucks, an “open hiring” policy that eliminates applications and interviews, so as to avoid any incidence of bias in hiring? I would hope instead that Starbucks would vet and improve its hiring processes, sustaining and evolving its bona fide practices and criteria, and eliminating and educating managers about unintentional, unhelpful bias in hiring. Similarly, whether or not Starbucks chooses to stop policing its bathrooms, it still needs to educate its employees about the inevitability that they’ll profile some customers as more respectable and preferable to others (based on perceived race, age, gender, socioeconomic status, physical and mental abilities) and to train their employees to discern how to engage with the diversity of the public at the cash register, when closing up their stores, when someone asks for change or directions, when someone pays for their order with change scrounged from the bottom of their bag or when someone has lingered over one cup of tea for several hours.

Because the only way to realize the promise of equity and inclusion in our collective experience and impact is to practice doing what we need to do, everyday, with a commitment to learning and growing.

A false inequivalence

Consider this: someone is accused of murder, and 60 other people step forward, offering as a defense of the accused that they themselves weren’t murdered by this person.

Does that sound absurd? 

How about if someone is accused of sexual harassment or assault? Because that’s what’s playing out in the accusation—now three accusations—against Tom Brokaw. After one woman spoke up, 60… 65… (and perhaps still counting) women have publicly and collectively vouched for Brokaw’s “decency and integrity.” 

The rationale seems to be that if he didn’t harass them, he couldn’t have harassed the other women. And in the court of public opinion, the fact that there are more women whom Brokaw hasn’t allegedly harassed than there are women whom he has allegedly harassed, well, it’s all the more proof that he couldn’t have harassed anyone. Ever.

And this standard seems to be unique to sexual harassment and assault claims. Think about it: when someone is accused of arson, do their defenders point to all the buildings that person hasn’t burned down as evidence that they couldn’t have burned down the building in question? Or, in a more pointed case, when Wells Fargo was accused of opening over 2 million accounts in customers’ names without the knowledge or consent of those customers, was the fact that other clients didn’t have accounts opened fraudulently on their behalf considered proof that no crime had been committed?

A different twist on this “proof is outside the pudding” logic, there was the defense of Sean Spicer’s treatment of journalist April Ryan: apparently, since Spicer was rude to lots of people, that was evidence that he wasn’t racist or sexist.

What the Brokaw and Spicer situations have in common is the perceived insufficiency of not just the claims made against them, but who made them: women, and in Ryan’s case, a woman of color. The idea being that they are inherently untrustworthy because, you know, they’re prone to “playing the [insert identity] card,” possibly hysterical and have “an agenda” that could irreparably damage the good names of the professionals whose “decency and integrity” we can all rely on without a petition.

Now, you’re thinking: don’t forget that those are 65 women who’ve spoken up in Brokaw’s defense. Yup. Like all people, they each get to make up their own minds about what and whom they believe. It’s just that whether or not we believe them depends on the side they pick.