The basics of the story are as follows: Two young men walk into a Starbucks and take a table. When asked for their orders they refuse to make one. They are told they must order something or leave, per café policy intended to discourage loitering. They refuse to do either. The supervisor then calls the police and calmly tells them she has two young men in her café who won't place an order or leave. The police arrive and ask the young men to leave. When they refuse, they are escorted out in cuffs, only to be released thereafter without charges.
Nothing to see here; or so one would think.
But a furor then erupts nonetheless, replete with Twitter mob hysteria and chanting demonstrators (who always seem to arrive on the scene in timely fashion, apparently unencumbered by gainful employment). The president of Starbucks issues apologies, fires the offending supervisor (a self-described "social justice feminist") and plans to close over 8,000 stores to hold Maoist-style re-education sessions for employees.
I wouldn't be writing about this, and the media wouldn't have bothered to cover it, but for one allegedly salient fact: The two young men escorted by police out of Starbucks were black.
Were the young men in question white, nothing would have seemed amiss; there would have been no media coverage, no firings, no "unconscious bias" training, no apologies and no Starbucks stores closed in Philadelphia or anywhere else.
But such is the hair-trigger, hyper-sensitive status of racial relations in Donald Trump's America, or, more precisely, the incendiary nature of media coverage of such relations.
Per which, two observations:
First, that the story received nationwide coverage only because it fit the liberal narrative of pervasive white racism. Its significance thus flowed not from the facts, innocuous as they were, but from a broader set of ideological assumptions on the political left regarding race in America.
The most interesting part of the story was therefore how a non-story becomes a story, an outcome explained only by the thick degree of shared ideological belief between the liberal media and the Democratic Party.
In the words of Andrew Klavan, "American journalism is a largely Democrat affair. ... Furthermore, black voters vote Democrat by huge margins so it stands to reason the America-is-racist narrative is a winner for the Democrat party. So journalists are Democrats and Democrats believe America is racist and the America-is-racist narrative helps Democrats. Thus, incidents that can be spun to make America look racist will make the news."
More specifically, the key component of the "identity politics" paradigm, to which the Democratic Party has become increasingly wed, is the convincing of black voters that white people are still incorrigibly racist. A constant search for evidence of that proposition must therefore occur, which a sympathetic mass media is assigned the task of carrying out.
Under no circumstances can a more complex narrative be permitted, one which might acknowledge a dramatic reduction in racism over time as the consequence of an equally dramatic shift in thinking about race on the part of white Americans.
The second observation flowing out of the Starbucks non-story/story concerns how racism has come to be conveniently redefined in the identity politics paradigm, such that it bears little resemblance to traditional conceptions.
Racism once meant Jim Crow, sitting at the back of the bus, separate drinking fountains, and a broader denial of equality based on superstitious notions of black inferiority.
But the noble purpose and great achievement of the civil rights movement was to tear down those legal and political barriers to black advancement and refute the underlying justifications for "separate but equal" (which was of course, separate but seldom equal).
Over time, systems of racial preferences were established, the "N word" was seldom heard (except from black comics), and legal/political equality became enshrined, to the point of electing the nation's first black president. On the surface at least, America became a conspicuously less racist place.
But that's where the catch comes in, because according to the left's cynical identity politics narrative, racism simply became covert in its manifestations, expressed in "institutional" and "systemic" forms based on new concepts like "white privilege" and "intersectionality." The progress achieved in combating it was thus purely illusory.
More important, as racism moved from mostly seen to mostly unseen (even "subconscious" in nature), it became easier to claim that it is still pervasive and determinative without having to provide any actual evidence to that effect. It became a quasi-religious article of faith, a non-falsifiable hypothesis incapable of being empirically proven or disproven because its manifestations had become so subtle, even microcosmic in nature.
Once we move into the realm of "unconscious bias," we have left behind facts and data and lost any means of redress or reasoned discourse; the "narrative" becomes everything, and everything must be made to fit the narrative, even if doesn't.
In the end, the identity politics game requires that racism be found somehow somewhere, even in a Philadelphia Starbucks that served dozens of black customers on a daily basis for years without incident.
Because if we acknowledge that racism has actually declined, identity politics would die, and the Democratic Party with it.
------------v------------
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 04/30/2018