What's called pop culture is largely a network of brands and products that can cut across cultural lines and, if used in constructive ways, sometimes connects and gets people thinking about larger ideas and themes within the society.

For example, I love Star Trek. I could probably talk about Star Trek till I'm old and gray. And sometimes when I'm in the airport or on a plane, I'll be watching an episode and someone will see it, smile, giggle, or make a comment. Those people have been every race, every gender, and every nationality. The product (i.e., a television show) acts as a common frame of reference where the themes associated with it can be used to bridge differences, while allowing for the greater ideas about humanity within the show to be discussed.



To give the benefit of the doubt to Howard Schultz, in the past he's taken stands on marriage equality and employing returning veterans . The idea for "Race Together" reportedly came from Starbucks' employee forums created by Schultz in the wake of the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. There's something to be said about business leaders that acknowledge the concerns of the community they live in and profit from. And we live in a culture based around an interaction of media and commerce.

From Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic:

While I'm all for constructive criticism and skepticism, this unorthodox, long-shot effort strikes me as a bizarre focus for ire, especially given how many examples of egregious racial injustice there are in America. In fact, while "Race Together" should continue to be subject to critical scrutiny, a negative reaction is much more likely to do harm. It sends this message: No effort to grapple with race in America will go unpunished. No matter how well-intentioned, it will be attacked preemptively out of any proportion to its place in the hierarchy of racial problems in the country.

Larry Wilmore : Do we really expect some poor barista to handle a conversation on racial politics? That’s a lot of pressure. Who are they going to get, Cornel West?

Her name was Anita, and she was new to the area, working as a concierge consultant for wealthy homeowners who travel. Despite reading the newspaper and going to Starbucks up to five times a week, she had no idea "Race Together" was happening. That didn't keep her from instantly echoing some of the most common points of criticism that had already appeared in the media. "It's too busy, and there's too much traffic. I don't see the opportunity to have any meaningful dialogue," she said, looking over at the never-disappearing line. "For any employee, it's another level of accountability they put on people who clearly make above minimum wage. It's to make the corporate offices feel better, but I don't see the advantage to the employees other than more stressors." Anita had inadvertently described my experience a few minutes before in talking to Mike, one of the baristas, a stocky twentysomething white guy with a beard and earrings who looked like everyone's thoughtful gamer buddy. Just pulling Mike aside for two minutes was enough to see the number of waiting customers double. He never stopped looking over his shoulder and attempting to perform a make-work task to obscure the fact that he was chatting. Like all multitasking, it left him doing more than one thing fairly badly — moving a towel around haphazardly while trailing off and having difficulty engaging questions. He also looked about as comfortable as a housecat walking through wet grass when asked to speak for his billion-dollar employer about race.

But with Starbucks, the current situation is one that lends itself to cynicism. Starbucks and Schultz are not donating $100 million for charities to address the underlying problems. This initiative says comeour product and then we'll talk. It associates and markets Starbucks with multiculturalism in the same way Coca-Cola once advertised itself as the brand of world peace . This is about a brand trying to get people to believe it cares about them and the world. And as much as people on Twitter have giggled at this, they're still talking about Starbucks (hell, I am too) and that's advertising in itself.From Jeb Lund atAnd those that see "Race Together" as just an extension of Starbucks' marketing policy argue that it in some ways ties into the larger debate about corporate personhood. All of these marketing endeavors position a brand as something real that's the customer's "friend." But they neither exist as flesh and blood people, nor are our friends in any sense of the word. They sell us shit we want and they make money from it. No more. No less. Comcast, Disney and General Electric get to be on my friends list if, after I get shitfaced in public, they're a buddy and come down to pick my drunken ass up.

By buying into the idea of big business as friend, it's another case of the corporations responsible for some of the societal ills that cause inequality using them to profit even more. This has been the mindset around other big business marketing debacles seemingly aimed at doing good that have been skewered by public reactions.

Last month, Dove launched its "#SpeakBeautiful" initiative during the Oscar telecast. Its stated aim is attempting to change the way people talk about female body image on the internet. However, similar to the reaction to Starbucks, many thought the campaign was ridiculous, phony and obfuscated the fact Dove wants to make a profit off of soap. Caitlin Dewey, in the Washington Post, wrote that Dove only wanted to “lull consumers into a sense of intimacy so human, so convincing, that you forget that Dove is actually trying to sell you something.”

Coca-Cola recently engendered a similar reaction with its #MakeItHappy automated social campaign. Introduced during the Super Bowl, it was designed to be a statement about negativity on the internet. People could send negative tweets using the #MakeItHappy hashtag to Coca-Cola and it would be converted to happy ASCII art. Gawker decided to use a Twitter bot to tweet lines of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf at Coca-Cola to see if the brand would turn the lines into art. It did, and shortly thereafter Coca-Cola pulled the campaign.



"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children" turned into ASCII art by Coca-Cola.

The cringiest recent moments in corporate marketing have been corporations mistakenly thinking that the dull, routine interactions people have with them in day-to-day life can be repurposed into life-affirming moments of joy. There’s a certain dark irony in the massive institutions that are largely responsible for the alienated isolation of the average American taking on the task of fixing that alienation with cutesy hashtags ... I mean that marketers spend so much time immersed in their “brand” they start to fail to understand what all of us do, on a pretty basic level, understand–that Coca-Cola is a big giant money-grubbing profit machine and no amount of “branding” will change that. That there’s something surreal and creepy and, most of all, stupid about an actual human being interacting with us wearing Coca-Cola’s name on Twitter and pretending to “be” Coca-Cola.

From Arthur Chu atThere's also something inherently wishy-washy with "having a conversation" about an issue, especially one like race. It reminds me of how when something is too hot-button or intractable, it usually gets shunted to a blue-ribbon panel or presidential commission to have a conversation about the best way to proceed. It lets people feel like they're doing something without really doing anything at all. A conversation also implies there are at least two legitimate ways of looking at something. But what exactly is the other legitimate side of tolerance, respect and dignity? It's the year 2015. We shouldn't need a conversation to figure out unarmed black men don't deserve to die because they make some white people nervous.

In Starbucks' own press release, they claim the "Race Together" initiative is "not to point fingers or to place blame." Well, sometimes if you want to get to the crux of an issue, someone has to say that something is wrong and point a finger at what's wrong. But therein lies the rub of big business being humanity's savior. Doing that might mean they could offend someone they want to sell something to.