A Loyalty Test for a Latte |
A Brooklyn coffee shop told a sitting congressman it would have thrown him out. The law has a word for that, and it is not “activism.” It is discrimination – and we should stop pretending otherwise.
This weekend, a Democratic congressman walked into a Williamsburg coffee shop with his seven-year-old daughter, bought a coffee, and left. The barista, by the congressman’s own account, was kind. She let his daughter use the bathroom. He bought a coffee in return for the kindness.
Then the shop posted his photograph to the internet.
Poetica Coffee tagged Representative Dan Goldman directly, published an interior image of him standing at the counter, and announced that his coffee did not “taste like genocide juice.” It informed him that “here at Poetica, we don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between.” It told him that “too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.” It refunded his money, unasked, with the explanation that “we don’t need your money (it’s probably coming from AIPAC anyways).” It closed: “Don’t ever come to Poetica.”
Let us be precise about what happened, because precision is the whole point. A business open to the public identified a customer, decided after the fact that he belonged to a forbidden category, voided the transaction he had completed, and posted a standing notice that people like him are not welcome and will be turned away on sight. The shop’s own website promises that “whoever walks through the door is treated with unconditional dignity,” that “the door doesn’t close on anyone.” The door closed. It closed on a Jewish public official because the shop treated Israel, AIPAC, and pro-Israel civic participation as proxies for a forbidden identity.
This was not a boycott of a policy. It was the marking of a person, which is what these boycotts are really about to begin with: racism against a people, dressed up as a disagreement with a state.
The oldest trick, run again
The defense writes itself, and Poetica’s supporters have already written it: We didn’t refuse him because he’s Jewish. We refused him because he supports genocide. It sounds like a distinction. But it isn’t. It is the oldest trick in the discrimination playbook, and the law stopped falling for it a long time........