The world of the wokes is a place where something considered laudable one day might be considered offensive the next, and where friends can just as quickly become enemies. The owners of the Mina’s World cafe in Philadelphia had the misfortune of learning this lesson the hard way when their activist employees turned on them.
LibsOfTikTok recounted the rise and fall of the ‘queer-owned’ coffee shop last Tuesday. Near the launch of Mina’s World, Sonam Parikh, co-owner of the cafe alongside Kate Egghart, told Bon Appetit that at other cafes, “white ownership neglected to protect their black and trans employees.”
“I knew there needed to be a space where you could have an amazingly made cup of coffee that’s not whitewashed,” Parikh added in the 2020 interview.
Life comes at you fast.
Within two years, the tables had turned, with employees lambasting the business for “systemic employer opposition, manipulation, abuse of power, exploitation, anti-blackness, ableism, hostility and complete disregard for our livelihoods.”
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The employees also released a list of demands for the cafe, including one urging its owners to “redistribute the business” and “begin the process of transforming the business into a Co-operative.”
As LibsOfTikTok put it, Parikh and Egghart then responded with a now-deleted “hostage-style video in which they repeatedly apologized for being gentrifiers.”
The groveling cafe owners pleaded for the forgiveness of their detractors in an Instagram live stream, saying, “We’re complicit in the gentrification and anti-blackness on 52nd Street. We put our community at risk with our presence as well as our workers.”
“We put our workers in harm’s way each day that we’re open, and we want to recognize that harm and want to uplift their concerns and needs,” a sullen Egghart explained, “We want to be accountable for [...] our complicitness with gentrification and our engagement with anti-blackness in that gentrification.”
“With the guidance of the workers and the Black and Brown Workers Collective, we’re trying to raise funds to buy the business and turn it over to our staff,” the pair announced.
This decision may not have been the wisest, as the property would soon be listed for sale by its owner and Mina’s World officially closed last week.
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