PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2018-11-06 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did a Starbucks Executive Say That 'White Men Are the Root of All Evil'? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • In November 2018, Facebook users shared a boilerplate post which claimed that Rosalind Brewer, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the behemoth Starbucks coffee chain, had once declared a belief that white men are the root of all evil: On 4 November, a user on the Tiger Droppings web forum shared the same claim, along with a link to an article on NewsPunch, the rebranded name for the notorious junk news purveyor Your News Wire: An archived version of the original article shows that it was published on Your News Wire in February 2018 and was the original source for the claim that spread on Facebook several months later. The article, under the headline Starbucks CEO: White Men Are Root of All Evil, read as follows: You may have noticed the chain of sourcing at work in Your News Wire/Newspunch's article: it quoted from SilenceIsConsent.net (a hyperpartisan right-wing web site with a history of putting exaggerated, misleading, or sensationalised twists on news stories), which in turn quoted from a Washington Post article, which in turn described a 2015 CNN interview with Brewer, who was then CEO of the Walmart subsidiary Sam's Club. At no point did the Your News Wire/Newspunch article include any statement by Brewer in which she said that she was triggered by the sight of white men in business, or that she believed white men are the root of all evil. A brief check on all the sources cited in the article showed that neither SilenceIsConsent.net, the Washington Post, nor CNN's original interview contains such statements by Brewer. SilenceIsConsent.net falsely claimed, based on the 2015 interview, that Brewer (who is black) doesn't really like white guys (and also misidentified her as Starbucks' CEO) and the Post reported on a Twitter-driven backlash against Brewer's interview, which some commenters claimed revealed an anti-white viewpoint on her part. The interview, which was posted to YouTube by Walmart in December 2015, can be viewed below. Here's an excerpted transcript, which makes clear that Brewer never said white men are the root of all evil (or anything approximating that sentiment) and was expressing her enthusiasm for racial and gender diversity within Sam's Club, as well as an aversion to racial and gender-based homogeneity, rather than an aversion to white men as such: This subject was revived in October 2019 via an article published by The LA Post and headlined The NEW Starbucks CEO Has Admitted She Doesn’t Like White People ... (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url