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#5177 Jun 04 2018 at 9:00 PM Rating: Decent
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That would be a great comparison if Starbucks (or any store) had an official policy of not serving black customers.

Ironically, the comparison here is to the issue of Starbucks and it's policy of allowing (or not) people who aren't paying customers to linger in their stores. So... Um... great social justice accomplishment! I guess. Know what's not involved in this policy at all? The race of the person involved.
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#5178 Jun 04 2018 at 9:09 PM Rating: Good
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Way to miss the larger picture
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#5179 Jun 04 2018 at 9:10 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
That would be a great comparison if Starbucks (or any store) had an official policy of not serving black customers.

Ironically, the comparison here is to the issue of Starbucks and it's policy of allowing (or not) people who aren't paying customers to linger in their stores. So... Um... great social justice accomplishment! I guess. Know what's not involved in this policy at all? The race of the person involved.


It's not about Starbucks and it's policy of allowing a person who isn't a paying customer to linger in their stores. It's about the racist act of the cashier
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#5180 Jun 04 2018 at 9:39 PM Rating: Decent
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Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
gbaji wrote:
That would be a great comparison if Starbucks (or any store) had an official policy of not serving black customers.

Ironically, the comparison here is to the issue of Starbucks and it's policy of allowing (or not) people who aren't paying customers to linger in their stores. So... Um... great social justice accomplishment! I guess. Know what's not involved in this policy at all? The race of the person involved.


It's not about Starbucks and it's policy of allowing a person who isn't a paying customer to linger in their stores. It's about the racist act of the cashier


Then why show pictures about a sit-in movement specifically about black customers not being allowed to be served at a lunch counter? That was about changing the policy of the store (specifically one which was segregated). There's no policy of Starbucks which says something like "kick out people who are black". So even if we assume a racial motivation on the part of the employee, no policy change can fix that problem. The only policy change here is about whether to allow non-paying people to stay in the store. That's it.

My point is that the "accomplishment" of this didn't actually accomplish anything having to do with race or racism. The only effect (and presumably the objective of Starbucks) is that if they change the policy to allow non-paying people to linger in the stores, then no one will ever ask someone to leave for not paying, which means that no black person will ever be asked to leave for not paying, which means that no black person will ever be arrested for refusing to leave after being asked to do so for not paying, and no one will ever take video of that arrest, and Starbucks wont have to deal with the assumption that the black person was targeted to be asked to leave due to their skin color while (presumably) a pair of white men would not have been.

That's literally it. At best, you've spackled over the issue. Avoiding it by setting a broad policy to prevent the situation from coming up, or even the perception that it might come up. Nothing is actually solved though.

The real problem is that there's more or less zero way to prove that any action which negatively impacts a person of color *wasn't* influenced by some form of racial bias. You can always assume that there's some kind of systemic or hidden or even subconscious racial bias behind *any* negative act. And there's no way to counter that. Which makes it entirely based on whether or not the accusation is made, and not so much any sort of objective analysis of the facts themselves. Which I find to be a really really poor way to do things.
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#5181 Jun 05 2018 at 12:08 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
The real problem is that there's more or less zero way to prove that any action which negatively impacts a person of color *wasn't* influenced by some form of racial bias. You can always assume that there's some kind of systemic or hidden or even subconscious racial bias behind *any* negative act. And there's no way to counter that. Which makes it entirely based on whether or not the accusation is made, and not so much any sort of objective analysis of the facts themselves.

The counter to the assumption of racism is to explain why she did what she did, aside from racism. Can you do that?



Edited, Jun 5th 2018 12:10am by Bijou
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#5182 Jun 05 2018 at 8:14 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Their job is not to assess why they were asked to leave,
Actually assessing the situation is a pretty big part of police work.
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#5183 Jun 05 2018 at 7:51 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
gbaji wrote:
That would be a great comparison if Starbucks (or any store) had an official policy of not serving black customers.

Ironically, the comparison here is to the issue of Starbucks and it's policy of allowing (or not) people who aren't paying customers to linger in their stores. So... Um... great social justice accomplishment! I guess. Know what's not involved in this policy at all? The race of the person involved.


It's not about Starbucks and it's policy of allowing a person who isn't a paying customer to linger in their stores. It's about the racist act of the cashier


Then why show pictures about a sit-in movement specifically about black customers not being allowed to be served at a lunch counter?


Because you can use the exact same tactic for a multitude of reasons, and they ALL will get attention. The tactic is not solely for one movement, you can utilize it to your own purpose. Sorry that you can't seem to divorce the two.
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#5184 Jun 06 2018 at 7:32 AM Rating: Excellent
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You know how it is. Pictures are only worth one word.
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#5185 Jun 06 2018 at 6:43 PM Rating: Decent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
The real problem is that there's more or less zero way to prove that any action which negatively impacts a person of color *wasn't* influenced by some form of racial bias. You can always assume that there's some kind of systemic or hidden or even subconscious racial bias behind *any* negative act. And there's no way to counter that. Which makes it entirely based on whether or not the accusation is made, and not so much any sort of objective analysis of the facts themselves.

The counter to the assumption of racism is to explain why she did what she did, aside from racism. Can you do that?


"Explain" or "speculate". Obviously, we can't explain, because only she can do that, and she's not talking. Almost certainly because there was some sort of NDA agreement when she was fired, specifically so that Starbucks could control the public defense of their brand without her stepping into things. Starbucks is interested only in dealing with a PR problem, and has no interest at all in defending her actions (and in fact, attempting to do so would only make things worse, as the responses to my own posts on this forum prove). They're going to do just what they did: Fall on their sword. Apologize profusely. Donate some money. Make the rounds showing how much they care. Spend time/money on "training". Etc. Because this isn't about proving what happened. It's about repairing their brand.

But that doesn't provide us any sort of accurate assessment of what actually happened. Again, the last thing Starbucks wants to do is litigate the facts in the public forum. They lose if they do that. But since I'm not Starbucks and don't have billions of dollars at stake, I'm perfectly willing to talk more candidly about the more likely actual facts versus the PR narrative.

As to "speculate", I've done plenty of that. There are a host of possible explanations for what may have transpired between when the two men walked in and when she called the police. Most of them do not require that we make any assumptions that are outside the bounds of behavior that occurs pretty commonly in customer service jobs, and which do not have to have anything at all to do with the skin colors of those involved.

There are rude customers. It happens. There are offensive customers. It happens. There are threatening customers. It happens. As I've said repeatedly, I find it almost impossibly unlikely that the two men did absolutely nothing except be black, and that blackness alone prompted her to call the police. The obvious logic to this is that if that was all it took, she would have a long history of calling the cops on every single black person who'd ever stepped foot in the store. Obviously, there was more to it than that, right?

So, if we accept that there was "more to it", then the only question is whether that "more to it" would have prompted a different response from her if the two men were white versus black. And we simply don't have any evidence to show that this is the case. We can guess. We can assume. But we don't know. And my argument has been, all along, that in the absence of knowing, we should not assume that one specific thing must be the truth. In my experience "bad customers" come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

The argument that her actions must have been in response to their skin color purely because they were black and got arrested, rests on the completely bizarre assumption that no black person can ever do something which may warrant calling the police. And yeah... that's nuts. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people arrested nationwide for loitering, disturbing the peace, and trespassing each year, some of them are going to be black, right? I mean, just basic statistics tells us that this must be the case. But we're supposed to assume, after the fact, that if the person being arrested is black, that the arrest must be racially motivated?

Sorry. I still don't buy it.
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#5186 Jun 06 2018 at 6:50 PM Rating: Decent
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Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
gbaji wrote:
That would be a great comparison if Starbucks (or any store) had an official policy of not serving black customers.

Ironically, the comparison here is to the issue of Starbucks and it's policy of allowing (or not) people who aren't paying customers to linger in their stores. So... Um... great social justice accomplishment! I guess. Know what's not involved in this policy at all? The race of the person involved.


It's not about Starbucks and it's policy of allowing a person who isn't a paying customer to linger in their stores. It's about the racist act of the cashier


Then why show pictures about a sit-in movement specifically about black customers not being allowed to be served at a lunch counter?


Because you can use the exact same tactic for a multitude of reasons, and they ALL will get attention. The tactic is not solely for one movement, you can utilize it to your own purpose. Sorry that you can't seem to divorce the two.



Are you arguing that the two men intentionally entered the store and engaged in some sort of behavior designed to get the employee to call the police, specifically so they could be arrested and make a huge deal about it? That's the only thing that fits here.

The "tactic" you're talking about involves doing something you know is against the rules in the hopes of drawing attention to the fact that the rules are wrong. The problem is that in this case there's no rule saying "black people can't hang out at Starbucks". So there's no racial element to this. The closest we have is "you're not allowed to loiter if you don't buy something" and/or "only paying customers are allowed to use the restroom". And yeah, if that's the rule they were challenging, then they succeeded. But that still doesn't have anything at all to do with race.

Which was the point of my response. The fact that the men in both scenarios are black isn't the point. What rules they are challenging is. In the case of the Greensboro sit-ins, it was specifically about racial segregation. In the case of Starbucks, it's... not.
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#5187 Jun 06 2018 at 7:36 PM Rating: Good
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The racist called the cops, the cops got there, and the gentlemen stayed and waited, in order to show the racist actions to the world, by getting attention paid to the fact that the clerk was a racist.

How are you not getting this?
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#5188 Jun 06 2018 at 8:00 PM Rating: Decent
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Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
The racist called the cops, the cops got there, and the gentlemen stayed and waited, in order to show the racist actions to the world, by getting attention paid to the fact that the clerk was a racist.

How are you not getting this?


I'm "not getting this" because your entire chain of logic rests on the assumption that there's absolutely no legitimate reason a store employee could have to call the police on someone in their store if that person happens to be black. If the person is black, it must be entirely because of their skin color. Which, as I stated above, completely flies in the face of known statistical reality.

Sorry. I find that to be absurd reasoning. There is absolutely zero reason to assume that she called the cops on them because of their skin color. Except for the fact that they were black. Which, just to drive the point home, is true for everyone who is black. So unless you're arguing that no black people ever do something with justifies a call to the police, then you have no reason to assume that this isn't one of the many cases in which a call to the police was justified.

it's only after the fact, after the police arrive, and after a video of the arrest (which, of course, shows us nothing of what happened prior to that point, much less what may have precipitated the call to the police in the first place), that it's simply declared that "it must be racial bias". Again though, with zero evidence for this other than the fact that the two men were black.

What part of this are *you* not getting? I've explained this logic to you several times now. You have not bothered to even try to refute it, and instead just keep calling the employee a racist, and assuming that she did what she did for racist reasons. Um... Play a scenario out in your head and ask what would the result be if she was *not* racist, and the men had done something that warranted the call to the police? It would have looked exactly the same in the video we saw. You can't tell, after the fact, what motivated the original call. That's the issue I have here. People are assuming she had no justified reason to call the police, so it must be racism, but you literally have no reason to believe that.

Maybe this is strange, but my starting assumption when a store employee calls the police on someone in the store, is that the person they're calling the cops on did something to warrant calling the police. That's the first and most obvious assumption to make. Spinning off into a conspiracy theory about the true motivations may be an amusing thing to do, but isn't likely to be correct. Assuming the employee was really motivated by racial bias is just that: a conspiracy theory. It's nutty. Seriously. Outside of poorly written TV or film plots, no one actually behaves like this in the real world.
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#5189 Jun 06 2018 at 9:31 PM Rating: Decent
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Do you really believe that racism just doesn't exist? You don't understand that people think "I really don't want these [insert minority group here] around me"?

That's nuts.
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#5190 Jun 07 2018 at 4:21 AM Rating: Good
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lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Their job is not to assess why they were asked to leave,
Actually assessing the situation is a pretty big part of police work.
Yup and good police work should've had the police speaking to the manager and questioning her and confirming something along the line of, "Really? You want to kick them out for that?" and then if she insisted, then escort them out.
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#5191 Jun 07 2018 at 7:44 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
As to "speculate", I've done plenty of that.
That you have.
gbaji wrote:
I still don't buy it.
That's easy when you base your entire world view on nothing but speculations that make you feel better.
gbaji wrote:
Spinning off into a conspiracy theory about the true motivations may be an amusing thing to do, but isn't likely to be correct
You do recognize that you're the one whose entire narrative begins and ends at his own speculations and assumptions that have nothing to do with the actual situation, right? You literally argued that you must be right because no one can find any examples that prove your narrative correct because the media is hiding it from the world.
Uglysasquatch wrote:
Yup and good police work should've had the police speaking to the manager and questioning her
And the people that were witnesses. These particular cops definitely dropped the ball.

Edited, Jun 7th 2018 10:10am by lolgaxe
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#5192 Jun 07 2018 at 5:18 PM Rating: Default
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Debalic wrote:
Do you really believe that racism just doesn't exist?


Of course not. That would be just as absurd as assuming that any action taken by a store employee which negatively effects a customer of color must be racially motivated. I'm the one arguing the absurdity of that assumption which *is* the assumption being broadly made in this case.

Quote:
You don't understand that people think "I really don't want these [insert minority group here] around me"?


I do understand that there are certainly "some" people who think that way. I also understand that people who think that way would, you know, work hard to find work in which that condition is met. Such a person would be unlikely to work in a customer service job where there are certainly going to be quite a number of said minority customers coming in. And if they did choose to work there for some reason, they'd likely not act on whatever racial issues they have, because otherwise they'd lose their job the first day.

The idea that someone could rise to the level of store manager in a retail job, in an area which has a high percentage of black customers, and have such deep seated hatred for black people that she'd call the cops on the two men simply for "being black" is ridiculous. Like I said, outside of film and TV, that just doesn't happen. People with that level of racial hatred tend to have a hard time holding down jobs. They avoid jobs in which they deal with the public. For exactly the reason that their racism can't allow them to interact with people on that level.

Quote:
That's nuts.


Yes, it is. Which is why it's not remotely what I was saying. The very argument you're making about the kind of person who would act in the manner being assumed here, somewhat invalidates the likelihood that this particular manager *was* such a person. She could never have lasted long enough in that job to make it through the 90 day probation period, much less rise to shift lead, much less a manager position.

Which is why I have been arguing all along that there simply must be more to what happened than that the two men were black. Because if that's all it took to trigger that reaction, how did she not get triggered long ago?

Edited, Jun 7th 2018 4:21pm by gbaji
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#5193 Jun 07 2018 at 5:30 PM Rating: Default
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Their job is not to assess why they were asked to leave,
Actually assessing the situation is a pretty big part of police work.
Yup and good police work should've had the police speaking to the manager and questioning her and confirming something along the line of, "Really? You want to kick them out for that?" and then if she insisted, then escort them out.


Ok. Maybe "assess" was the wrong word to use. My point is that they are not empowered to pick and choose whether to enforce the law. If she insists on them removing the two men, they are required to do so. She's empowered to make the choice, not them. She's the legitimate person "in charge" of the property in question, not the officers.

We also don't know what conversation may or may not have occurred between the officers and the manager who called them. I'd assume that at the very least, when they arrived, she would have had to point them to the two men they were being asked there for, right?

I worked retail for a number of years. I've called the cops many times. There's always a conversation involved, where the officers want to know the details of what happened, what was said, who did what, etc. It usually happens after the situation is resolved though, subjects in custody, etc. So yeah, it's a good bet that such a conversation did happen. Assuming that the cops dropped the ball simply because you haven't been explicitly told something is pretty silly.

Here's the point though. The officers are not allowed to speak to the media about these details. And it appears that the employee is not allowed to either (my presumption, but it's reasonable given the circumstances). What we have here is both the police and the store engaging PR folks to resolve things. And while that's usually best for defusing the anger over something like this, it's absolutely terrible at ensuring that the public knows what actually happened.


I'll also go out on a limb and assume that at no point did she say something like "these two men were black and in my store, so I wanted them gone". Right?
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#5194 Jun 08 2018 at 1:25 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
I'll also go out on a limb and assume that at no point did she say something like "these two men were black and in my store, so I wanted them gone". Right?
Many racists wouldn't/wont as they don't want decent people knowing.


Edited, Jun 8th 2018 1:25am by Bijou
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#5195 Jun 08 2018 at 7:27 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
If she insists on them removing the two men, they are required to do so.
Oh, strike two. Want to rewatch those episodes of Law & Order before trying again?
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#5196 Jun 08 2018 at 12:32 PM Rating: Good
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lolgaxe wrote:
[quote=gbaji]If she insists on them removing the two men, they are required to do so.
Oh, strike two. Want to rewatch those episodes of Law & Order before trying ****************** no, that was a terrible show. Desperately needed to replace the leads.
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#5197 Jun 08 2018 at 12:38 PM Rating: Decent
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
[quote=gbaji]If she insists on them removing the two men, they are required to do so.
Oh, strike two. Want to rewatch those episodes of Law & Order before trying ****************** no, that was a terrible show. Desperately needed to replace the leads.

Other than Waterson and...Merkerson, wasn't that show a revolving door of detectives and lawyers?



Edited, Jun 8th 2018 2:38pm by Debalic
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#5198 Jun 12 2018 at 7:41 AM Rating: Good
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Guy in Florida, because of course Florida, killed four kids, and put a cop in the hospital before taking himself out. Good guy with gun takes out bad guy with gun? If only they let one year olds have guns this would have never happened? Proof that personal apartments need to be taken off the gun-free zone?

On the more amusing note: Paint drying.

Because anything is more amusing. De Niro is looking to go the same crazy politics route that Clint Eastwood was, so that's nice.
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#5199 Jun 12 2018 at 7:52 AM Rating: Good
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lolgaxe wrote:
De Niro is looking to go the same crazy politics route that Clint Eastwood was, so that's nice.
Gotta have the crazies balance each other on the political spectrum.
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#5200 Jun 12 2018 at 8:13 AM Rating: Excellent
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Looking forward to DeNiro debating a BarcaLounger.
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#5201 Jun 12 2018 at 12:25 PM Rating: Good
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