Tomorrow afternoon, May 29, Starbucks will close its shops to provide “racial bias training” for its employees. This was precipitated by an event in one of their Philadelphia stores earlier this year when a white employee called the police because two black men used the rest room and were sitting at a table without ordering. The men were accused of trespassing.

Nalani Cobb writes about this in the New Yorker and includes the list of reasons white people have recently called the police about black people. It's a list I've read before. I guess that's why the statement below seems particularly interesting.

The crucial aspect of the Starbucks story isn’t whether a company can, in a single training session, diminish bias among its employees. It’s the implied acknowledgment that such attitudes are so pervasive in America that a company has to shoulder the responsibility of mitigating them in its workforce.

As Cobbs says, there is always skepticism about such attempts. But that is no reason not to try. I look forward to the end of bias in public spaces.

I recently read a month-old issue of Time magazine and found a fascinating article, "6 Ways We Can Reduce Gun Violence in America." They are all sensible, and I think, helpful. I sent this link to all of my legislators, both national state. If hundreds of people did this, they might actually listen. Here's part of the intro:

No other developed country has such a high rate of gun violence. A March 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that Americans are 25 times more likely to die from gun homicide than people in other wealthy countries. There are commonsense steps we can take to reduce that toll, but they require acknowledging certain truths. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, and there are approximately 265 million privately owned guns in the U.S., according to researchers from Northeastern and Harvard universities. Any sensible discussion about America’s gun-violence problem must acknowledge that guns aren’t going away. “We have to admit to ourselves that in a country with so many guns, progress is going to be measured incrementally,” says Jeff Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine.

Finding Peace

In The Last 100 Days, David B. Woolner quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt: “...today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.”

How, oh how?

Just Write

From Naomi Shihab Nye” “Very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. It's an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it." (Interviewed on OnBeing)