ABSTRACT
Some people are simply better than others at saying what they mean and sounding sincere in the process. When a Starbucks manager called the police to evict two men who had entered a Philadelphia coffee shop to discuss a real estate deal, the cops didn’t just tell them to move along. They handcuffed the men and took them into custody. Of course, the two men were black, feeding a continuing narrative about American business and police harboring a long‑standing bias against people of color. Upon viewing bystanders’ videos of the incident, Starbucks’ CEO Kevin Johnson described the scene as “very hard to watch.”
