Mellody Hobson Will Chair Starbucks Board of Directors | Mami Wata Is Thrilled

Seattle-based Starbucks Corp appointed Mellody Hobson as its chairwoman Wednesday, saying that Hobson will succeed Myron Ullman III when he retires in March. Co-chief executive at Ariel Investments LLC, Mellody Hobson has been a member of the Starbucks board since 2005.

The Starbucks announcement coincided with Wednesday’s 2020 Forbes Power Women’s Summit, where Hobson placed 94th on the 2020 Forbes Power Women list.

AOC last featured Hobson in October when she made a named donation to Princeton University to build a new residential college to be built on ground that was formerly home to Wilson College.

“America was born with a birth defect—as my friend Bryan Stevenson from the Equal Justice Initiative says—and the thing about a birth defect, which for us was slavery, is that a birth defect is not fatal,” Hobson told Moira Forbes, executive vice president of Forbes Media, during Wednesday’s summit. “But you never get rid of it, and pretending it’s not there doesn’t make it go away.”

Mellody Hobson proposes three approaches to dealing with society’s inequalities:

Start counting. Companies should tabulate and analyze diversity at all levels of the company’s workforce. “You can't pat yourself on the back and 90% of your diversity comes from assistants who happen to be Black women. That doesn't work,” she said. A similar analysis should be done among suppliers and vendors.

Embrace being the first or only. Early in her career, Hobson observed that she was often the only Black person or Black woman in the room. And her name was Mellody. Rather than focusing on aloneness or unfairness, Hobson determined to use reality to her advantage.

“If Mellody is going to be something that really does stand out and I’m the only one, then I’m going to be like Cher or Beyonce where I don't even need a last name because you're going to know that I'm there. And if I'm there, I'm going to have original ideas. And I'm going to have a point of view and I'm going to be willing to take risks,” Hobson told Forbes Women.

Own your power — and use it. To people who say they can’t create change, Hobson says, “No. Rosa Parks decided not to stand up. Let's just start with that. She changed an outcome in a major, major way for our society; she broke down barriers by just refusing to stand up on that bus.”

Starbucks Logo Siren Goddess Mermaid

The Starbucks siren as we know her has been around for a decade, and she’s periodically dissected by fine minds like Fast Company’s Mark Wilson in January 2018. From its small beginnings in 1971, the Starbucks logo design has always been a two-tailed mermaid, Logoworks wrote in June 2017.

Terry Heckler, the original sketch artist for the logo, searched for a nautical theme to dovetail with ‘Starbuck’, the first mate in Moby-Dick. After extensive research, Heckler decided on an old woodcut of a siren as his final inspiration. The Starbucks blog shares her story, reminding coffee drinkers that a siren has two tails, compared to a mermaid, which has one.

Atlas Obscura picked up the Starbucks siren story in 2015, tracing her back to the 8th century Otranto Cathedral, located in Italy’s Puglia region. Here the symbolism becomes fertile for Mami Wata and other African goddesses — several of them water goddesses — because the slave trade from ancient times to Medieval in Italy’s Puglia region is well-documented. Across the world, Mami Wata was known to travel on the slave ships — often on the bow — as a way of keeping slaves calm in the midst of their catastrophic and inhumane, traveling horror show.

Of course, AOC loves Mami Wata as a water spirit venerated in West, Central and Southern Africa. She is very connected to Mellody Hobson’s financial success, and treated with deference by Anne, as you will learn when we continue this story in a new post.

This is where we’re going: The Many Faces of Mami Wata Smithsonian Magazine