[MUSIC PLAYING] REPORTER: When a white Starbucks manager in Philadelphia called the cops on two black men for sitting in the store without buying anything-- 

PROTESTOR: Our justice-- 

REPORTER: --Starbucks found itself facing a massive PR crisis. The company responded by announcing that, today, all 8,000 of its company-owned locations would close early for staff to attend racial bias training. Starbucks invited Vice News to a media event to hear a sanitized readout from employees who participated. 

- Most Americans don't like talking about race, and they definitely don't like talking about their own racism. So it's sort of hard to imagine the guy who makes your venti nonfat caramel macchiato suddenly becoming more woke just because he sat through a 4-hour seminar. 

- Dear Starbucks partners. I'm Stanley Nelson, a documentary filmmaker. My films are about race, America, and the decades-long struggle for all people to be treated as equals in public spaces. 

- This training might make people less likely to call the cops on you, but it's sort of hard to know how your average Starbucks employee feels about the whole thing because Starbucks won't let us talk to any baristas or anybody who you'd actually interact with in a Starbucks. Instead, they invited a bunch of media outlets to interview a hand-picked group of district managers who all seemed really excited about the whole training thing. 

- It was a really great experience. It was a really great interaction that I got to have with some of my peers. 

- Were there any moments in there that felt uncomfortable at all? 

- I don't know that uncomfortable is the right word to describe it. There were times that I watched some things and it made me go, wow, I don't experience life like that. 

- Well, I have to make sure that my hands are visible when I walk into certain places so they make sure I don't-- not stealing, just leaving the house some days, you know-- sometimes you just keep you at home and just keep you away from everything. 

- That was a little bit like a punch to the gut a little bit. 

- But for a lot of people-- say, Black people-- this isn't so much a punch in the gut as it is just a reminder of what you go through every single day. And that doesn't seem like a whole lot of fun to sit through. And that's the thing-- Starbucks says they want to confront all forms of bias, but most of their training material is laser-focused on anti-Black racism, which isn't bad in and of itself. But it's not just black people who deal with bias in America. Islamophobia is still happening. Homophobia has not gone away. People are getting yelled at for speaking Spanish in public. 

Starbucks says this is just the first session in a larger training plan, but for right now, it feels like a narrow response to what happened to black people in Philadelphia. And even that might not make much of a difference. 

- Do you think you can train racism out of people? 

- I do not feel I can answer that question. I'm not sure if-- because I don't think that's something that you can train or you cannot train. 

- I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, I guess if it's something that is trained into people, why wouldn't you be able to train it out of people? 

- No, I don't. And I don't think that's what the attempt of today was either.