How Did The Starbucks 'Race Together' Campaign Go So Wrong?

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has always tried to do right by his company, his customers, and his country. So why did his Race Together campaign go so wrong?

- Austin Carr, photographs by Joo Canziani

Howard Schultz doesn’t have all the answers.

It’s early April, just five days after a police officer fatally shot Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in South Carolina, and the Starbucks CEO is on stage at Spelman College, the historically black institution of higher learning for women. He’s here for a panel discussion with United Negro College Fund chief Michael Lomax and Spelman president Beverly Tatum, author of the best seller Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Schultz is seated in an awkwardly large white sofa-chair, fielding tough questions from the crowd, mostly black students who have come to hear this white, 61-year-old billionaire speak about racial inequality.

Not long ago, he might have looked more out of place. But the crowd already knows that the head of the world’s largest coffee company is willing to thrust himself into this emotionally charged issue. Only three weeks earlier, he made waves with Starbucks’s “Race Together” initiative, an effort to spark a national dialogue about race in response to the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner two other unarmed black men and subsequent civil unrest. It was a bold idea that backfired. Starbucks had encouraged its baristas to write race together on the cups of coffee they served and engage customers in conversations. But critics lampooned what came across as a superficial gesture, and the backlash exploded onto social media, where Race Together received 2.5 billion impressions in less than 48 hours—much of it, Schultz complains, driven by a barrage of negative tweets filled with “visceral hate and contempt for the company and for me personally.”