Things We Saw Today: Starbucks to Close All 8,000 Locations for One Day to Train Staff About Racial Bias

By now, we’ve all heard about the preposterous incident that occurred at a Philadelphia Starbucks. Last week, two black men entered the Starbucks asking to use the bathroom as they waited for someone, and were denied. When they sat to wait for their friend, a Starbucks employee called the police, and the two men were arrested for trespassing. It’s something that would likely never have happened had it been two white men.

Now, after having met with the two men, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson has announced that on May 19th, all Starbucks locations will be closing for the day to educate their staff on racial bias. It’s certainly a positive step. However we, like columnist Jeneé Osterheldt, have some concerns:

(via News Channel 3, Memphis)

• Sailor J. is not having sites like Buzzfeed taking her Twitter threads whole-cloth and making articles out of them. She came for them hard, both on the original offending article, and in yet another Twitter thread. Someone please just give this woman all the money. She’s an established writer and YouTube personality. Not some random “Twitter user.”
• Check out this awesome profile on Lea Kissner, the woman in charge of Google’s internal privacy strike force, NightWatch. (via Gizmodo)
• Wanna read some spoileriffic speculation on Season 9 of The Walking Dead? Check out Den of Geek and why they think the show’s next season might take place during the comic’s most infamous time jump.
• WHAAAT? Evan Rachel Wood won’t be earning pay equal to that of her male co-stars until she starts Season 3 of Westworld. Didn’t HBO know she was the lead of the damn show?! (via Indie Wire)

What have you seen out there today?

(image: Starbucks)

Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com

Author

Close

Teresa Jusino

Teresa Jusino (she/her) is a native New Yorker and a proud Puerto Rican, Jewish, bisexual woman with ADHD. She's been writing professionally since 2010 and was a former TMS assistant editor from 2015-18. Now, she's back as a contributing writer. When not writing about pop culture, she's writing screenplays and is the creator of your future favorite genre show. Teresa lives in L.A. with her brilliant wife. Her other great loves include: Star Trek, The Last of Us, anything by Brian K. Vaughan, and her Level 5 android Paladin named Lal.

youtube