A few weeks ago, we relayed the story of a pair of woke women, one white and the other one black, who became a high-earning juggernaut in the 'racial justice' industry -- only to watch their relationship burn to the ground, in an orgy of racial grievance and recrimination.
The reason the two women became an activism duo in the first place stemmed from a racially-charged 2018 incident at a Starbucks location in Philadelphia:
On April 12, 2018, a video recorded at a Philadelphia Starbucks captured the arrest of two innocent Black business people who asked to use the store’s restroom because a white employee called the police. The footage quickly spread across social media after its posting. Both Saahene and DePino witnessed their unjust arrests. In the 46-second clip, Saahene can be heard saying, “They didn’t do anything. I saw the entire thing.” The viral moment changed the future of Starbucks, as the business received a ton of backlash. People protested at different locations nationwide, causing the company to close down all of its stores for a day to conduct diversity, equity and inclusion training with its employees to help prevent situations like this from happening again. Shocked and upset to have witnessed a blatant case of racial discrimination, DePino tracked down Saahene to educate herself by having an honest dialogue about racism before she posted her video clip online.
The two became friends, then business partners, before the whole enterprise angrily collapsed. But the Philadelphia episode itself is now back in the news because the corporation's actions in the wake of that controversy triggered a lawsuit from a white employee who claimed she was terminated in an illegal, racially-discriminatory way. A federal jury in New Jersey heard the facts and unanimously agreed with her:
The jury found that Starbucks had violated the federal civil rights of the former manager, Shannon Phillips, as well as a New Jersey law that prohibits discrimination based on race, awarding her $600,000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages...At the time of the episode, Ms. Phillips oversaw about 100 stores in Philadelphia, South Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland. She had been promoted to the job in 2011 after what she called her “exemplary performance” in six years as a district manager in Ohio. Ms. Phillips said in the suit that Starbucks, as part of its damage-control effort after the arrests, had sought to punish her and other white employees in and around Philadelphia even if they had not been involved in the events that led to the police being called...
Amid the image-burnishing campaign, Ms. Phillips said one of her superiors, a Black woman, told her to suspend a white manager who oversaw stores in Philadelphia, though not the one in Rittenhouse Square, because of allegations that he had engaged in discriminatory conduct — allegations that Ms. Phillips said she knew to be untrue...in contrast, Ms. Phillips said, no action was taken against the manager who oversaw the Rittenhouse Square store, a Black man who Ms. Phillips said had promoted the employee who called the police. Ms. Phillips said she was fired not long after balking at the order to suspend the white manager. She said that she had not been previously told that she was doing a bad job and that the only explanation she was given for the firing was that “the situation is not recoverable.”
Starbucks went woke, hard, and now they're on the hook for a $25 million payout to a woman they unjustly terminated on racial grounds, per the jury's verdict. I've written before that I'm not a litigious person, but I increasingly believe that creating financial pain for institutions captured by left-wing orthodoxy may be one of the only ways to force our culture back toward something approaching a more neutral equilibrium. What happened to Starbucks is good. What happened to Oberlin College is good. The same applies to right-wing pressure campaigns designed to counteract heretofore dominant left-wing pressure campaigns. I'll leave you with a tough, contested match-up in the woke Olympics identity bracket:
Maryland Dem grovels after saying Muslim kids against LGBTQ+ lessons aligned with ‘White supremacists’ https://t.co/qxRs3hbibG
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 12, 2023
