On Tuesday, Starbucks closed 8,000 stores for several hours of racial bias training, a dramatic move meant to change the way employees understand racism and their jobs. This was in response to a national outcry last month when an employee at a Starbucks in Philadelphia called the police on two black men for simply sitting in the cafe.
“Educating ourselves on understanding bias,” a senior Starbucks executive, Rossann Williams, wrote in a note to employees, would allow Starbucks to make sure that its shops were “welcoming and safe for everyone.”
This is a worthy goal with a long history. Public goods and public accommodations — schools, lunch counters, coffee shops, cake shops — have long been battlegrounds for our prejudices. But “educating ourselves on understanding bias” is an insufficient solution to discrimination, which Starbucks has rightly acknowledged as it pledges to do more after the training. If we believe it’s wrong to use the police to express prejudice, then we cannot simply ask people to think differently.
Instead of training sessions, Starbucks could make more of a difference by helping cities fund non-police options for people worried about suspicious behaviors. Employees at a Starbucks in Oakland, Calif., for example, posted the phone numbers of social workers and others who are trained to de-escalate conflicts. If we funded these resources to scale, we could make it less likely that an employee calls the police for a “quality of life” complaint that turns out to be unwarranted.
Bias trainings like the ones being conducted by Starbucks rest on the idea that racism lives in a person’s heart and mind, and eradicating it is internal work. So if the Starbucks employee in Philadelphia had been more aware of concepts like implicit bias, this idea suggests, she would not have called 911.
Yet this approach belies science as well as what history shows is a more effective way to work against discrimination.
Psychologists have long known that prejudice is a weak predictor of discrimination. In fact, research reveals that 90 percent of behavior is driven by how we react to situations, not by attitudes. Thus, the question is not how to educate people but how to reshape situations so that fear or dislike of black people does not produce an armed response. And the way we reshape situations is with policies.
Historically, this is what we do when we take discrimination seriously.
When black people were denied public accommodations under Jim Crow, when black children were deprived of equal education, we did not try to educate people about prejudice. We went to court and we made laws. We passed the Civil Rights Act and we orchestrated litigation that culminated in the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. We said, “This behavior is not acceptable.” We did not say, “Please change your mind.”
In 1972, our national response to gender discrimination in education was not an advertising campaign about women’s aptitude. We passed Title IX and made it illegal to discriminate against people at schools and colleges because of their sex.
In 1990, when we rallied behind people with disabilities facing systematic discrimination, we did not start an awareness campaign to persuade architects to think differently about people using wheelchairs. We passed the Americans With Disabilities Act.
We have the opportunity to do this again in the domain of policing, to protect black and brown people who face the threat of police violence simply because others feel they do not belong where they are. We have reached a critical mass of awareness. Now we need action.
Policies that make it impossible, illegal or unacceptable to call the police for things like “loitering” are how we protect black and brown people from prejudice that results in police officers showing up with their guns drawn. There are already false-complaint regulations on the books; we just need to enforce them better and provide more alternatives to police involvement.
As it happens, this is what police officers have been saying for decades. This month, my organization, the Center for Policing Equity, held its biennial conference, where police chiefs from around the country made clear that we cannot continue to demand that officers respond to drug abuse, mental health crises, family disagreements and the whims of a prejudiced populace.
“If we were serious about protecting against bias,” said Chris Burbank, the retired police chief of Salt Lake City and a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity, “we would give 911 operators more choices than guns and fire hoses.”
By failing to supply these resources, we ensure that the police will respond to “public disorder” complaints with force. Of course, we strive for a future free from stereotypes. But we do not need to wait until we get there to start protecting black and brown people from discrimination and the dangers it brings.
While Starbucks and the public do the hard, slow, personal work of trying to purge deep-seated prejudices, we also have to decide that the people being hurt are worth protecting.