IS AMERICA FINALLY FED UP WITH LIBERAL RACISM?

A week after announcing his "Race Together" campaign, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz walked it back. His baristas no longer will write "Race Together" on the coffee cups of customers, or try to engage them in "conversations" about race relations in America.

The response he got wasn’t the applause Mr. Schultz was expecting.  Corey duBrowa, Senior Vice President of Global Communications, received so much negative feedback he deleted his Twitter account the day after the campaign was announced.

"Last night I felt personally attacked in a cascade of negativity," he said. "I got overwhelmed by the volume and tenor of the discussion, and I reacted."

The upside of the short-lived campaign is it gave baristas a chance to make use of their PhDs in sociology, tweeted the Internet humorist Iowahawk.

Most baristas were relieved to have it end.

"This isn’t the forum to have these discussions," Jaime Prater, a barista who is (half) black, told the liberal website ThinkProgress. "Having your baristas engaging in those conversations, it puts them in a very difficult position."

PBS anchor Gwen Ifill, who is black, spoke for millions when she tweeted: "Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well."

 "Race, and intimations of racism, are not the same as talking about sports or the weather," said Philip Terzian of the Weekly Standard. "People lose their livelihood, and lives are blighted, by racial discourse. What sort of boss would treat his employees this way?"

Evidently Mr. Schultz values the approval of fellow liberal elitists more than his customers. I suspect those most disappointed by the end of the "Race Together" campaign were stockholders in Dunkin Donuts.

The Starbucks campaign was "a hollow bit of moral exhibitionism" said Mona Charen of National Review.

"Each and every time we’re hectored to engage in an ‘honest conversation’ about race, it’s a sham," she said. "What’s wanted is not honesty, but confession of sin by white people."

Which crossed the boundary between the personal and the political. The "Race Together" campaign wasn’t as intrusive and rude as the protesters who’ve been disrupting Sunday brunch at restaurants around the country. But its purpose, like that of the "BlackBrunch" protesters, was to hector and bully, not to engage in "dialogue."

An "honest conversation" about race would raise awkward questions for liberals about why – half a century after passage of landmark civil rights legislation – blacks in cities governed for decades by Democrats are further behind now than they were then.

If there were an "honest conversation," liberals who eagerly spread the noxious "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot" lie about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson might receive the condemnation they deserve.

Slavery was neither unique to America (our word "slave" is derived from "Slav," the peoples most often enslaved in Roman times), nor was uniquely harsh here. Most Americans – who neither owned slaves nor approved of slavery or segregation — share no guilt for either. (Democrats – the party of slavery and segregation – do.)

The election of a (half) black man as president indicates white racism is largely a thing of the past. Further proof is liberals now call "racist" Americans who share Martin Luther King’s dream that one day all will be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

The racists in America today are those who make everything about race.

The razzing Starbucks received is a sign Americans are fed up with being hectored and bullied about race.

Last Sunday (3/22) customers and staff in restaurants in the suburbs of Atlanta and Minneapolis angrily chased away "BlackBrunch" protesters who came to disrupt their meal.

"You’re stirring up conflict. Go home!" yelled a white man sitting with black friends at a table in Sweet Melissa’s in Decatur, Ga.

"The whole restaurant yelled and swore at us," whined a protester chased out of Maynard’s restaurant in Excelsior, Minnesota. "They put their hands on us. Our signs were taken."

People resent being insulted and bullied. Imagine that.  Maybe now they’ll refuse to be insulted and bullied any longer by the Racist-in-Chief in the White House.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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