Would you want a side of race relations with your daily double-shot short cappuccino? Then, U.S. coffee drinker, Starbucks has a corporate initiative for you.

Yes, Starbucks, the ubiquitous middlebrow coffee chain, said on Tuesday that it would begin encouraging its employees to further the free discussion of race in America through a program called RaceTogether. Baristas can signal their interest in a conversation by writing the campaign’s name on a patron’s cup, a space previously reserved for the finer points of drink orders and the occasional creative spelling of “Stephanie.”

“We at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America,” Starbucks C.E.O. Howard Schultz said in a post on the coffee chain's Web site.. “Not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are.”

In addition to the post, the company took out full page ads in The New York Times and U.S.A. Today. The first asked, “Shall we overcome?” The second said, “When it comes to race we are all human.”

Starbucks employs approximately 200,000 people. Schultz, the Arianna Huffington of the coffee industry, has long been willing to experiment with store policies. After a few years of lobbying by anti-gun activists, Schultz in 2013 asked customers not to bring guns into his stores. In 2012, he released a statement saying the company officially supported same-sex marriage. Last year, the company announced that it would help pay for its employees’ college tuition, so long as the employees were interested in Arizona State University’s online programs. (Starbucks’ goodwill campaigns have not saved the company from landing in extremely hot water over some of its more controversial practices, such as its use of scheduling software that has wreaked havoc on the lives of some of its low-income employees and their families.)

Starbucks said that employees at the company have been discussing race in conversations prompted in part by relevant events in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City. “Baristas in cities where the forums were held said they wanted to do something tangible to encourage greater understanding, empathy and compassion toward one another,” the company’s statement read.

A neighborhood coffee shop might, in an ideal world, be the type of place where conversations about race and community take place, but Schultz and Starbucks must know that their baristas might well end up offending a number of customers. How will employees choose which customers to approach for conversations about race? Will customers of color feel as though they are either being singled out or avoided for such conversations? At what point does a barista end a conversation and return to the mounting stacks of latte orders awaiting them?

A vocal group of Twitter users set about answering those questions on Tuesday.

This is fraught territory, and not just because of the nature of race relations in this country. Many Starbucks interactions are at peak hours, when lines of overworked office-dwellers meet equally exhausted baristas working hard to keep the caffeine economy rolling along. A dose of difficult discussion to that interaction will certainly inject a new dynamic in participating Starbucks locations. Whether that’s good for Starbucks, for customers, and for the state of race relations the United States remains to be seen.

UPDATE (March 23, 2015): In a memo posted to Starbucks's Web site on Sunday, Schulz wrote that the program would stop writing the call-outs on customers's cups. "This phase of the effort—writing 'Race Together' (or placing stickers) on cups, which was always just the catalyst for a much broader and longer term conversation—will be completed as originally planned today, March 22," the C.E.O. wrote.