Starbucks and the Race-Hustlers

 Via comment by Badger on Eric Holder to Help Starbucks Train Employees For …
 

Another day, another boycott of Starbucks.  The coffee company has been singled out for everything from its “no firearms in the store” request to its support of redefining marriage to its declaration it would hire 10,000 “refugees” in response to President Trump’s immigration agenda.

Unfortunately for Starbucks, its politically correct, feel-good social justice policies have hit a snag.  The corporation’s liberal-leaning initiatives are not enough to keep Black Lives Matter agitators at bay.

Two unnamed black men, arrested for trespassing at a Philadelphia Starbucks last week, are the latest martyrs for the cause.  Calls for a boycott of Starbucks ensued soon after a video of the arrest went viral.

The stars aligned for the race-hustlers, as a published author and proponent of the “implicit bias” and “white privilege” theories, according to her 2016 Facebook posts, just happened to be sitting in the same Starbucks as police arrived.

Melissa DePino filmed the arrest in an eight-minute video, and before long, BLM activists were blocking the entrance to the establishment.

DePino has already appeared on MSNBC and tweeted this a day ago:

So many people have thanked me for posting this video.  While I appreciate it, it also makes me wonder why it’s not just expected that we use our position of privilege to open the conversation so that we can LISTEN to those people who experience this every day.

We’ve been here so many times before.  DePino is a young, white, well connected activist-writer lecturing Americans on their privileged skin color.  Funny that DePino’s name has been published in every article about the incident but not the names of the two men arrested.

Seems their attorney, Stewart Cohen, has refused to identify his clients.  A different attorney who had earlier represented them had described them as professionals in commercial real estate.

At the halfway mark in the video, a 30-something white man appears, asking the police what is going on.  Turns out he is the person the pair was set to meet at Starbucks.  The man, Andrew Yaffe, a local real estate developer, can be heard defending the pair, saying, “This is absolute discrimination.”

Yaffe’s timing was picture-perfect.  He didn’t show up until after the police arrived and after DePino had begun filming her video.  What happened before the police arrived and how long the two men had been in Starbucks without ordering anything have not been determined.  No published media reports have revealed their names or the specific interaction between the men and the manager.  A Starbucks representative reported to the press that “Holly,” the manager, and corporate had come to a “mutual decision” to end her employment with the shop at 18th and Spruce Street.  In her own defense, Holly claims that “loitering is an ongoing problem at the branch.”

The men were asked to leave three times by the police and refused.  Why didn’t they just order a cup of coffee?  Most restaurants do not allow patrons to take up space without ordering something.

Corporations like Starbucks are sitting ducks for radical, anti-capitalist groups like the Soros-funded Black Lives Matter.  Appeasement never works with these bullies.

In 2015, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, a Democrat, inspired by the Michael Brown and Eric Garner ruckus, waded into the morass of race relations.  He launched a campaign under the banner “Race Together” to get baristas and customers talking about race.  Schultz urged employees to write the phrase on their customers’ coffee cups to open up a conversation.

It didn’t go over so well.  Rolling Stone magazine and other leftist publications proceeded to mock Schultz as “part of a broader corporate policy of telegenic issue acknowledgement that tries to ward off inconvenient bottom-line responsibility for improving the status quo or redressing injustice.”  In other words, the redistributionists saw the white, liberal, bleeding-heart Schultz as a greedy capitalist who “didn’t build that.”  The Rolling Stone writer stated that a “billion dollar corporation like Starbucks” should cough up its “tremendous resources to address race in this country.”

There’s no question Starbucks has been on the race-baiters’ radar.  Until police release the names of the two men, we won’t know whether they had an agenda or are connected to Black Lives Matter.  Certainly, BLM and their funders are not above such a ploy.

Incidentally, why are police not releasing their names?  Could it be that the new Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, who appeared with “his personal friend,” BLM organizer Asa Khalif, during his campaign last year, winning their support, has skin in the game?

Khalif was one of the first agitators to rally protesters outside the Philadelphia Starbucks last week.  On April 15, he stood at the counter of the Starbucks with his bullhorn, demanding that the manager be fired.  The photo in the Yuma Sun is worth a look.  A white, male barista, actually working for a living, stands silent as Khalif proves why calls for “dialogue” and “conversation” with thugs are laughable.

Khalif is Philadelphia’s Al Sharpton.  A week after Krasner took office this past January, Khalif gathered up a dozen protesters to stand outside Krasner’s office calling for the release of a prison inmate convicted for a 1991 murder.