You provide an interesting treatment of the story. I was working on a post about this as well but I’m not sure it will see the light of day. I teach at Community College of Philadelphia, and I brought up the situation in three of my classes. My students opinions ranged from, yes, it’s definitely an example of implicit bias, to, yeah, probably an example. If you are black you’ve very likely experienced this sort of treatment in public. So, what is interesting to me is that this exact situation might not be the best example of implicit bias and profiling, but that ends up being beside the point, because we ultimately can’t really separate the micro from the macro. I compare it to how a couple might argue about a chore in the house. If one person points out a specific example of the other not doing their share of the work, it can almost always be argued that it’s no big deal. “Are you hassling me about the dishes again?!” But what the person is really trying to point out is a pattern of disrespect. In general, the general public has a hard time accepting that there are patterns of micro aggression type abuse. I’ve seen it many times that someone pointing out an example like the Starbucks situation is accused of just trying to sow division. There are a lot of people that literally don’t think racism exists. So although I agree with your argument that the protesters are sowing manufactured rage, I can also totally appreciate their desire to take advantage of a viral story to push the narrative that things are pretty screwed up. There are two different stories. One is that what happened at Starbucks might be an example of what black people experience daily. The other is that black people experience implicit bias and racism all the time.
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Forgot to add: one detail that hasn’t come out through the media treatment of this is that the policy to boot people who don’t buy anything was apparently just imposed three months ago. This detail came from a student of mine who works at a different Starbucks in Philly but knows, and has worked for the manager in question. This student (a black male, incidentally) said a) the manager is definitely not racist (and in his opinion she just made an embarrassing mistake and he feels bad for her) and b) that everyone working at Starbucks knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. So, on one hand, maybe these two guys pushed the situation on purpose to test the policy and then make a scene. Or maybe it was that they had sat in Starbucks before, and even used the bathroom, without paying in the past. There are a lot of maybes, as you point out as well. My gut tells me these two men pushed the scenario a bit, but again, sometimes that is what we do in conflict to draw attention to a bigger pattern of disrespect. Personally, no matter what the truth of this one situation is, I’m glad it helped raised awareness. The bias that people of color experience is just such a drain on everyone effected by it, so Starbucks being forced into addressing is ultimately a positive thing, in my opinion.