Punished enthusiastically for enthusiastically
supporting racial discrimination

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Shannon Phillips, a former Starbucks employee for thirteen years who was fired from the company following a racial incident at one of its stores, has been awarded back pay and $25.6 million in compensatory and punitive damages by a jury, who ruled she was fired simply because she was white and Starbucks needed a scapegoat.

The controversy began when the staff at a Starbucks store called the police on two blacks sitting in the store.

Rashon Nelson and his friend Donte Robinson were arrested at the Philly Starbucks in April 2018 after an employee called 911 to say they weren’t paying customers and had refused to leave. The men, who said they had been simply sitting at a table waiting for a potential real estate business partner to arrive, were arrested for trespassing.

In response to the widespread protests that followed, Starbucks temporarily shut its 8,000 locations nationwide in order to give its employees “anti-bias training,” while coming to an out-of-court settlement with the two men, whereby they each were paid a symbolic $1 but the company set up a $200,000 program to help young entrepreneurs.

The company also decided to fire Phillips, even though she was not at the store when the incident occurred. That firing was because she had objected to the company’s order for her to suspend a white manager who had had no connection to the incident at all.

The company’s rationale for suspending the district manager, who was not responsible for the store where the arrests took place, was an allegation that black store managers were being paid less than white managers, according to the lawsuit. Phillips said that argument made no sense since district managers had no input on employee salaries.

In other words, Starbucks was looking for someone white to be a scapegoat it could blame for everything, and that scapegoat had to be white. And if it couldn’t be that white district manager, then white Phillips would do.

Meanwhile, the company did not fire the black manager of the store who actually called the police. Both that manager and another black district manager testified for Phillips at the trial, noting that she was “someone beloved by her peers [who] worked around the clock after the arrests.”

This story is important because of the size of the award. Unlike most recent pushback court cases, the award wasn’t simply symbolic and enough to cover lawyers’ fees. Instead, Starbucks was hit hard by the jury, painfully so.

The time is long past for more such verdicts, by juries instead of judges. Lawyers defending similar clients like Phillips have got to stop looking for symbolic victories, negotiated by the courts. They have to demand jury trials and significant payments, not only from the company or government institution that supported the illegal discrimination or blacklisting, but from the individuals who actually instigated it.

Personally responsibility means you take responsibility for your actions, for good or ill. If you decide to act badly, then in a free society you must recognize the possibility that your bad action will cost you, badly.

We have been too nice for too long, letting such ugly behavior go unpunished. This has got to stop, and Phillips victory shows us one way of doing so.