Early April, two men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks. Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson arrived at 4:35 p.m. for a business meeting scheduled at 4:45 p.m. Less than ten minutes later, the two men left in handcuffs after the store’s general manager called the police to report that the men were not paying customers and refusing to leave. Later, in an interview with "Good Morning America," the men said they didn’t have a chance to speak with the manager about what was going on, or discuss with police why they were being arrested in the first place--they were simply handcuffed and forced out of the coffee shop, scared and confused.

I sit in Starbucks almost every day. Going to the nearest location, sitting down and getting work done, or even just hanging out reading a book has long been a tradition of mine. Sometimes I’ll even treat myself to a caramel macchiato or iced coffee, but not all the time. Some days, I just like to come to Starbucks for the environment. The constant in-and-out of customers and the smell of coffee beans always ignites my motivation and keeps me high energy, no matter if I’m actually caffeinated or not.

Many people have the same notion--every time I go to have a study session, I see people camping out, with books or notes spread across the table. I’ll often see people gaming on their laptops, or just scrolling through their phones.

But I’ve never gotten arrested in a Starbucks. I’ve never even seen an employee ask someone to leave because they weren’t a paying customer. But for some reason, Nelson and Robinson weren’t allowed to do what thousands upon thousands of Americans do every single day. Multiple witnesses said the men weren’t being disruptive or threatening--they were just sitting, yet they were still thrown out.

Realizing why these men were arrested was somewhat of a depressing reality check for me, but it’s something that people of color in America have never been allowed to forget: racism is still alive and thriving in this country, even in 2018.

Most people think of racism as a thing of the past, but unfortunately, it is an ever-present issue. Racism is a problem for all of us; whether we are the victims or the proprietors, and it’s a larger problem than we all think. As Leonard Pitts writes for the Miami Herald, racism is more than simply prejudice against a race or ethnicity. This prejudice is interwoven in the system by which the whole of America operates--it’s in everything. It’s in our institutions such as government and school; it’s in our laws and customs. Racism allows for a system in which two men of color, like Nelson and Robinson, can be arrested for sitting in a coffee shop.

People of color have to learn how to survive in a system like ours. We, as white people, were the ones who built it in the first place--racism isn’t someone else’s problem. Racism is a white problem, and it’s up to us to dismantle it.

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson made a step in the right direction in his company’s response to the incident. At first, he issued the typical apology, claiming that the arrest isn’t reflective of Starbucks’ values, blah, blah, blah. But then, he did something different: Johnson announced that on May 29, all 8,000 U.S. based locations will close so the nearly 175,000 employees can receive training to prevent implicit racial bias. In other words, Johnson stepped up and took ownership of the racism that presented itself in his coffee shop, and is trying to rectify it.

Whether this training will yield positive changes is yet to be seen--the training isn’t going to magically erase racial discrimination in white institutions, but the act of recognizing racism as an American problem and taking ownership of it speaks volumes. It speaks volumes that a company as expansive and recognizable as Starbucks is actually acknowledging that racism still exists today, and is at least attempting to eradicate it--because that is the first step in fixing the broken system that allowed the arrest to happen in the first place. Brushing racism under the rug and handing off blame from person to person is useless. We, as a country, cannot fix a problem until we take ownership of it.

Racism is not just an old problem. It’s not just a Starbucks problem. It’s an American problem, and it’s about time we come forward and pick up the blame. To quote the late Martin Luther King, Jr., “To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.” It’s time we, as white Americans, step up to dismantle the system that we put into effect in the first place--let’s stop being accomplices, and become opponents.