Over the last half-decade, worker-led struggles have spread across US cafes, warehouses, universities, media outlets, and beyond. Reviving the bottom-up spirit that enabled unions to make their big breakthrough in the 1930s, recent worker-to-worker initiatives have shown how this can be done in our sprawled out, economically decentralized conditions. Building off the best traditions of left trade unionism, and leaning on the novel affordances of digital tools, they’ve pioneered new forms of organizing that can extend widely enough to confront the systemic ills plaguing working people.

This enthographically-based essay uses the case of Starbucks and the company's diversity policies and relationship with Magic Johnson to explore the desire for postracialism in post Civil Rights—post Martin Luther King, Jr. and post protest—mainstream America. Where did this desire come from and how did corporate America package this desire? What is the relationship between the selling of postracialism and voting for Barack Obama? What are the implications of these marketing moves? What do they tell us about business and about ourselves?