Ten years of #racetogether
on different kinds of cringe
Welcome back to the This Day newsletter (catchier, right?). Each week, a member of our team gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…
March 20
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is published
1952: The Senate ratifies the Security Treaty between the United States and Japan, formally ending the American occupation of Japan
1959: A skirmish between the fisheries police and an oyster boat results in the death of a Virginia oysterman — and sheds light on a decades-long battle known as the “Oyster Wars.”
1976: Patty Hearst is convicted of bank robbery
1980: President Jimmy Carter is about to issue a decree that says the the US will boycott the Russian Games
March 21
1925: The Butler Act prohibits the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee
1937: A peaceful march in Ponce, Puerto Rico is attacked by police, who shot and killed 19 Puerto Ricans, including a seven-year-old girl, and wounded over 200 others
March 22
1621: The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony sign a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags, the first official treaty between English settlers and Native Americans
1972: In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the United States Supreme Court decides that unmarried persons have the right to possess contraceptives.
2015: Howard D. Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, says in a letter to employees that baristas would no longer be encouraged to write the phrase “Race Together” on customers’ coffee cups.
March 23
1852: The birthday of Uncle Sam, the first time that the character appeared in a political cartoon
1872: Illinois becomes the first state to pass a law guaranteeing equal employment for women
1969: The Rally for Decency brings 30,000 flag-waving youngsters to the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, for a celebration of God and Christian values.
2010: President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Care Act into law.
March 24
1812: A political cartoon appears in a Boston newspaper lampooning a newly proposed election district. The district was the work of Governor Elbridge Gerry, and the cartoonist depicted the district in the shape of a salamander. Hence, the “gerrymander” was born
1947: Congress proposes a 2-term limitation on the presidency
1977: President Jimmy Carter authorizes direct diplomatic talks with Cuba for the first time since severing diplomatic relations in 1961
1989: The Exxon Valdez spills 11.3 million gallons of oil off Alaska, marking the worst U.S. oil spill
2017: President Donald Trump and the Republican party are forced to pull their attempt to repeal Obamacare
2018: 'March for Our Lives' rallies protest gun violence worldwide
2019: The Mueller investigation finds no evidence of collusion between President Trump and Russia in the 2016 election
March 25
1900: The U.S. Socialist Party forms in Indianapolis
1919: Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations becomes a reality with the adoption of the League Covenant
1965: Martin Luther King Jr. leads 25,000 to the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama
1966: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Virginia's poll tax is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment
March 26
1790: The U.S. Congress passes the Naturalization Act, requiring a 2-year residency
1863: Cheyenne Chief Lean Bear meets with President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. He would be dead at the hands of U.S. soldiers by June
1945: Allies secure Iwo Jima after a deadly battle, ending a military campaign between the U.S. Marines and the Imperial Army of Japan
1953: Dr. Jonas Salk announces a vaccine to prevent polio
1975: The Biological Weapons Convention enters into force, which effectively prohibits biological and toxin weapons
1979: The Camp David Accords peace treaty is signed at the White House
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Jody Avirgan’s turn at the typewriter.
Well, of course, the thing that jump out from the above is that we are now 10 years out from Starbuck’s doomed-from-the-start effort to try and spark conversations about race inside their coffee shops.
This has long been on our list of episodes to get to — a number of listeners have suggested — and we’ll try to sneak it into the lineup in the next few weeks. Having gone down the rabbit hole a bit, it’s a pretty stunning reminder of “gosh, ten years is a long time.” This was, undeniably, a cringey and ham-fisted effort, by a company that maybe didn’t realize that the country was kinda fed up with end-stage-capitalism wrapped in Obama-era kumbaya vibes1. I generally agree with John Oliver’s take above.
But take a look at how Howard Shultz described the initiative2:
Our nation is only becoming more diverse. To ignore, dismiss or fail to productively engage our differences is to stifle our collective potential. Diversity of thought and skills lead to more creative ideas and higher performance. Bias, even unintentional slights, sap our potential for shared prosperity while denying our shared humanity.
RACE TOGETHER is an initiative from Starbucks and USA TODAY to stimulate conversation, compassion and action around race in America.
For all our country’s progress, barriers to social justice and economic equality exist in far too many corners. RACE TOGETHER is not a solution, but it is an opportunity to begin to re-examine how we can create a more empathetic and inclusive society — one conversation at a time.
I mean, look, he’s not wrong! And with the hindsight of the last ten years, I’ll take cringey and hamfisted efforts to addres racism over hamfisted efforts to, you know, dismantle the Department of Education…
In the end, the story of Race Together is mostly the story of the backlash. A mocking of liberal elites, a shifting permission structure to be transgressive about some core values and decency… honestly, backlash politics is the story of America. Progress is very, very, uneven. One latte forward, two lattes back.
-Jody-
A couple other things of note:
This is interesting. For those of you in Richmond, there’s a re-enacment this Sunday of “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death” speech, which we did an episode about this week.
I’m going to talk about this a bit on Sunday’s show, but my new music podcast has an episode out on Graceland with Malcolm Gladwell. Mostly, I hope it provides a nice musical distraction, but we do get into the apartheid-era politics a bit. Check it out.
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Turns out, the outlet for that angst was Donald Trump.
Doesn’t this remind you of Bill Clinton’s “conversation about race” town halls? We did an episode about that.