Corporate DEI is Now a Recipe for Lawsuits (mini-doc)

In the Spring of 2018, a downtown Philadelphia Starbucks made national news… when two black men were arrested and escorted out by police. Nelson and Robinson had been sitting in the Starbucks but refused to make a purchase. They were technically violating Starbucks rules. When they refused to leave, the store manager had them arrested.

The arrests set of national protests. Starbucks immediately apologizes, and CEO Kevin Johnson announces a nationwide closure of Starbucks stores for an all-day, company-wide racial bias training. The manager who made the call is fired, and so is her boss. For the public, this is how the drama concluded–with two white employees being fired for racism in yet another brief chapter in corporate civil rights history…

But this isn’t the whole story….....

One of those fired employees responds by suing Starbucks. In court documents, a Starbucks manager–who wasn’t even present during the incident–claims she was fired because she is white. She claims she was a public relations sacrifice, a white pawn that Starbucks offered up in order to “convince the community it had properly responded to the incident.”

And she wins.

Shannon Phillips’ victory is a glimpse into the future, a future where these lawsuits are going to become a lot more common. This is the story of how Diversity Equity and Inclusion as we know it… is coming to an end. How the racial quotas, the preferential treatment, and the public relations sacrifices ---

Is all about to come crashing down. How five decades of civil rights law has been upended.