A twist on the old adage: How can you tell Shithead Hall of Fame® Inductee™ Kathleen Parker is lying? She’s writing a column!
I know writers are allowed to take certain “liberties” with their pieces, stretch the truth here, embellish tiny details there. As her readers (if there are any) know, Kathleen Parker is a pundit who prides herself on not having to leave her office to do much of anything. The "occasional" flip/flop in the same program on television (that could literally be another article all it's own!) can’t contain her true idiocy, she can be both “Beltway Insider” and “Same-as-you-and-me Outsider” that defends “The South” whenever she’s given the chance…because she’s southern? But even the great Kathleen Parker stretches incredulity when she opens one of her recent columns with the tale of standing in line at Starbucks at the “8-ish hour”.
Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz is concerned about the very clear racial divide in the U.S., and wants us to talk about race. As any supremely rich white man "philanthropist" is wont to do he started a campaign called the “Race Together”. This seemingly benevolent act is being soundly mocked in the pundit class and in general; we get the perpetual joke of a Starbucks “barista” annoyingly trying to engage sleepy coffee monsters in to discussing race relations before they get their fix. It sounds buffoonish because very few of us can actually have a mature conversation about race relations.
I’m the kind of liberal that thinks race is one of the most important things Americans are too afraid to talk about in public. The mere notion of even being perceived as racist is so uncomfortable to most people, they’ll do anything to avoid broaching the topic. Mr. Schultz is on to something with trying to get people to talk about it. Why do we have to continually perpetuate the idea that Americans only care about things when a catastrophe arises? We only care about gun violence when someone shoots a bunch of people in the face, we only care about “the terror” when they attack, we only seem to care about race relations when a black person gets killed or maimed by a police officer. These are all persistent problems that have the temerity to move to the front burner of society only to be brutally pushed to the back burner when "we" feel like we’ve “SOLVED” the problem for the moment.
Talking about race over a piping hot black cup of coffee is a valiant effort, but a wrongheaded one. I am grateful that at least people are attempting to find a way to have a dialogue about it. But when you have people like Kathleen Parker trying to trivialize it by writing a short fiction essay on her Starbucks trip and not a substantive thought piece, you know that America just doesn’t have the balls to do the right thing.
Ms. Parker (or more likely her poor assistant) is standing in line for coffee at the "8-ish hour", presumably in the morning? She name drops the beverage she’s after, as if to prove she was really there, and proceeds to notice that “Absolutely no one is talking about race.”
She trivializes the need to at least try to discuss race by bringing up other “problems” that we should discuss instead. How about abortion or world hunger? She asks, anything else but this race bullshit! Why is a purportedly southern white woman trying to steer the discussion away from race again? Did Ms. Parker’s great-grand-diddy own slaves or something? Did a black take the last box of Cheerios when she was grocery shopping recently, and she dare not think racists thoughts! Best we deflect on other things, and by other I don’t mean “the other”.
Ms. Parker, clearly not seeing the color of her pot, then states that Mr. Schultz's kettle is “aggressively out of touch with his target audience”. On top of this she insinuates that the average Starbucks goer is intelligent because they have newspapers and laptops in their possession, they don't need to be lectured to! That means smart right? Because I’d like to think that those who possess newspapers and laptops would be smart, but if you do ever read a newspaper you quickly discover that a some of people that can read and engage it are anything but informed or intelligent. Also, haven’t we learned that the internet has made us stupider as a society? The internets possesses the ability to be a mirror unto our culture, and lo we are found severely wanting.
Mr. Schultz isn’t “lecturing” anyone, he’s foolishly attempting to start a discussion. Instead of getting all in a flutter over it, perhaps Ms. Parker could seriously evaluate what is being presented. But she’d rather not do that, and instead declare the whole thing a colossal failure based on her fictional trip to Starbucks.
She relates that the only visible sign of the “Race Together” campaign is a “single inscribed cup next to the register”. Seeing as the campaign was rolled out the week she presumably went to this Starbucks, this can be seen as an oversight that will eventually be corrected with the appropriate painfully diversely populated people in posters, placards and banners that soon will adorn the establishment. Ms. Parker, attempting to mask her southern racist shame puts money in the “inscribed cup” as a sort of tithe. She relates that the “two baristas seemed in no mood to talk about race or anything else.” Which I don’t know if she’s mocking their presumed minimum wage earning to lack of care for discussing race relations, or that Mr. Schultz should’ve hired activists to be the baristas he wanted to discuss race relations with consumers. Also, is it more indicative that Ms. Parker didn’t attempt to ENGAGE the baristas to perhaps better gauge whether they were interested in discussing race relations? To me it’s more indicative that she made up this entire Starbucks sojourn.
She’s not done yet though, seeing as she has a bit more column space to fill out, Ms. Parker takes a seat and logs in to the Starbucks Wi-Fi. There it is discovered that she’s been automatically signed up for “the movement” by being inundated with all matter of links to the USA Today about race and the like. There’s even a test to tell just how racist you are! Does she take it? Of course she does! She scores “perfectly”, up to a point, the test craps out on her. But what does scoring “perfectly” mean to her? Of course, it’s a Kathleen Parker column, she’s not going to explain that! She could’ve enlightened herself to what the “Race Together” program was trying to accomplish by visiting the “other race-related links”. Instead she’ll just roll around in shitty anecdotes and call it a day.
Not being able to properly “meditate” on her test results because “probably because the music was too loud”, she ends her fiction there. Really. I mean, her columns not over, because she tips her hand at the fact that it’s probably okay to talk about race relations in public, because no one’s really talking about it. Whew! Bullet dodged on that one, eh Ms. Parker?
She posits that perhaps race relations based discussions are best left to the opinion page. Where presumably it can die on the vine of the perpetual news cycle and white people like Kathleen Parker won’t have to worry about it again for some time? Leave it to the black opinion writers to mull over, that’s what they were hired for, right? Didn’t we just finish black history month, isn’t the race relations discussion over for the year? Ms. Parker wrote absolutely nothing about race in all of February, I guess she felt shame in her southern heart and needed to atone by writing a fictional tale of getting a cappuccino at 8-ish and lambasting an effort to discuss race in a real way.
Even if it’s a bit misguided, the “Race Together” campaign is at least an attempt to get the ball rolling on discussing something that’s becoming much too great to ignore. And while yes perhaps world hunger and abortion are at the tip top of a lot of peoples lists (just look at the comments section on Ms. Parkers’ column), nothing is more important right now than talking about the growing divide in race relations. This affects us in our daily interactions with the world, well those of us besides Kathleen Parker, who would rather craft short fiction from her home office, kick the proverbial can down the road and not discuss race at all…ever. Do we continue the cycle of attempting to ignore the problem, or do we wait until white America is in the minority and then it will be a real problem that surely must be dealt with post haste. Sadly it’s definitely going to be the latter.
Sometimes casual racism is just racism.
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