Starbucks PR Chief Can’t Handle ‘The Conversation’ On Race, Quits Twitter

Shortly after Starbucks launched its new initiative, “Race Together,” on Monday to foster a national conversation on racial issues, the company’s chief of public relations needed a break and deleted his Twitter account.

Corey duBrowa, senior vice president of communications at Starbucks, explained his thinking in a post Wednesday on the website Medium.

“Last night, around midnight, I deleted my Twitter account,” he began. “I also blocked a handful of Twitter users — given the hostile nature of what I was seeing, it felt like the right thing to do.”

The campaign, which encouraged Starbucks baristas to strike up conversations on race with random customers, had only been in effect for a day before duBrowa had his fill of mockery and criticism. Many on social media have called the initiative everything from meaningless to actively harmful.

DuBrowa wrote that he felt “personally attacked in a cascade of negativity,” and worried that users attacking him over the widely-criticized initiative had made him a “distraction from the respectful conversation around Race Together that we have been trying to create.”

But after his brief respite, the PR chief was heading back into the trenches.

“To be clear, Race Together isn’t about me, it’s about we,” he wrote on Wednesday.

“So no matter how ugly the discussion has been since I shut my account down, I’m reaffirming my belief in the power of meaningful, civil, thoughtful, respectful open conversation — on Twitter and everywhere else.”