The Patriot Post® · Starbucks Pays a Latte Money for Racial Firing

Did the race-baiting haters on the Left just find a bunch of grounds in their coffee or what?

A former Starbucks regional manager was just awarded $25.6 million when the jury agreed with her claim that she was fired because of her race.

She’s white.

Shannon Phillips, who worked for Starbucks for 13 years and oversaw roughly 100 locations in the Mid-Atlantic region, was fired in 2018 after an altercation involving two black men at one of her stores. Our now-retired analyst Arnold Ahlert described it at the time:

On April 12, two black men entered a Philadelphia Starbucks where they were reportedly waiting for a friend to meet them. They asked to use the restroom but were denied because they hadn’t bought anything. While Starbucks’ official policy varies from store to store, this location has that rule in place. When the men were asked to leave and failed to do so, the manager of the store called police and reported that the men were trespassing. When the police arrived, they also asked the men to leave — three times according to Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross, who is also black. When they still refused to do so, they were arrested.

It took less time than spraying foam on a banana latte for the incident to blow up into a galling example of Systemic Racism™.

Protesters gathered outside Starbucks locations. Social media exploded with condemnation. The entire race-baiting industry saw yet another opportunity to make a buck.

In the days following that incident, as Phillips argued in her lawsuit, Starbucks “took steps to punish White employees who had not been involved in the arrests, but who worked in and around the city of Philadelphia, in an effort to convince the community that it had properly responded to the incident.”

White employees faced suddenly discovered allegations of racist treatment of minorities. For example, Phillips was told by a black superior to suspend a white manager over claims that he paid blacks less than whites. Phillips defended him but suspended him anyway, only to be fired herself two days later.

Starbucks said in a statement that the “Philadelphia market needed a leader who could perform” and that “Ms. Phillips failed in every aspect of that role.”

By the way, she was not the manager who called the cops in the episode that set off this whole thing. A black manager did, and he faced no disciplinary action.

Then-Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson even traveled to Philadelphia to apologize in person to the two black non-customers who had been arrested, and the two received an undisclosed settlement. The coffee chain further changed company policy to allow restroom use for anyone, whether they buy anything or not.

About six weeks after the incident, Starbucks announced it would temporarily close 8,000 of its company-owned stores and subject nearly 175,000 employees to a racially charged reeducation euphemistically called “sensitivity training.” By the way, at the time, 43% of Starbucks’ workforce were minorities.

In short, Phillips wasn’t just quietly shown the exit. Starbucks made an example of her in order to help reeducate all of its employees in the ways of leftist ideology. She was clearly humiliated and dragged through the proverbial mud.

That’s why the jury unanimously awarded her $25 million. And, as much as we hate to say it, the leftist race-baiters won’t learn any lessons unless and until they lose a lot more often at their own game.