Starbucks and Casual Fridays

One of the big changes in American culture since my youth is clothing.  Back in the day jeans and overalls were working class clothes.  Sailors for example wore jeans and white t-shirts.  Veterans home from the war maybe wore their khaki dress uniforms, or parts thereof, and the style migrated to others. My father, for example, wore overalls and blue work shirts on the farm, while when he headed to Greene for the weekly shopping trip and to pick up cow and chicken feed at the GLF store he would wear khaki, or gray twill styled something like a uniform. And hats.

When I went off to college in '59 my older sister was consulted about proper attire, resulting in a trip to Robert Hall, a now long-defunct clothing chain that might have been just a hair above Sears or Monkey Wards. Sports coats, dress pants and shirts were the uniform, or so I was told.

Meanwhile office workers wore dress clothes, suits and such.  Housewives wore house dresses, while secretaries dressed up.  Bottom line: you could make reasonable guesses about the class of any person by seeing how they dressed.  You could get a confirmation by looking at their car, always American and with distinct steps up the ladder.

Today those distinctions have faded, and I think in most cases have been obliterated.

That brings me to the Philadelphia Starbucks incident where the manager called the cops because two African-American men were waiting there without buying.  My intuition is the situation would never have arisen back in 1958.  Not only did we have no Starbucks, but if we'd had one most African-Americans would likely not have patronized it, out of financial concerns.  But, and I come to my point, hypothetical African-Americans in a 1958 Starbucks would have been well-dressed.  Their clothes would have said to the manager: we abide by your norms and conventions, we're "good Negroes", and don't be concerned.    Because of the fading of signals of social class, there's less certainty today, meaning more tension, and tension, IMHO, triggers racist thoughts and actions.