There are times when you see something and can’t quite be certain that it is sarcasm.
Is coffee racist? How drinking coffee perpetuates white supremacy
Created by Black people for Black people—and now a pillar of white supremacist capitalism. If you consume coffee, you are helping an industry built on racism.
by AFRU Staff | Monday, January 19, 2026
If you’re a person of color, you know what I’m talking about. You walk into a new coffee shop and your senses are overwhelmed with whiteness and you get the glare from the Karens. The white hipster barista lines herself up between you and the bathrooms, ready to tell you non-customers aren’t welcome.
If you have a white coffee drinking friend, he or she may have even let you in on the old coffee joke white coffee drinkers share when PoC aren’t around: “there are three things that are necessary in order to make a cup of coffee, and they are: first, a black man to roast the coffee; second, a yellow man to grind it; and third, a white man to drink it.”
Well, I’m here to validate your lived experience; coffee is in fact horribly racist, and there’s data to back it up.
Every facet of the coffee industry, in fact, is rooted in racism. From the moment the whites viciously stole coffee from Black and Brown People to the present-day Karen sipping her morning cup of white supremacy, whites have been able to drink the fruits of our labor and our culture with impunity.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s sarcasm, given two mentions of “Karens” in the first four paragraphs. If it weren’t for a single paragraph:
It’s a well-known fact that whites would be eating bland food, like plain bread and gruel, if it weren’t for their theft of culinary secrets from people of color, and especially Black folks. That’s precisely why when the whites found out about coffee, it became one of the reasons they decided to victimize and appropriate Black civilization wholesale.

Will my roughly 55¢ mug of coffee at home reduce my racism score by 90% since I don’t buy $5.50 cups of coffee from Starbucks?
it actually could be serious, as the rest of the article tells about how Evil White Men enslaved Noble Africans to bring coffee to our settler colonialist homes.
Sadly, we are not informed how strong American coffee drinkers evolved from our effete tea-swilling ancestors across the pond. How different would Our history have been had we not has the Boston Tea Party, and instead just told King George and his Parliament, “No thanks, we’ll just drink coffee instead”? Heaven forfend! we might just be singing God Save the King right now, and feting Prince Harry and Princess Meghan as Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of California.
The problem is that the satire is too good: our good-hearted and oh-so-nobly-intended friends on the left might just take this seriously.
But, in the end, if you simply must buy your cup of white supremacy on your way to the slave-wage job your capitalist oppressor lets you have, remember that the baristas at Starbucks are still on strike, and get your coffee from Wawa instead.



