Café Concord: A View from the Counter

I’m writing this from a bakery-café in Concord, Massachusetts—the cradle of the American Revolution, where ideals like liberty and equality were born anew in the New World. The croissants are fresh, the espresso is bespoke (lavender), and the staff layout is eerily familiar.

At the front: white staff—stylish, aesthetic, articulate—handling (bossing sometimes but in general everyone is exceptionally lovely & calm) model minority clientele with curated ease. In the kitchen: Mexican workers—efficient, invisible, foundational. It’s the same setup across most of America’s cool, clean consumer spaces: the aesthetic and the labor silently segregated by race and language.

No one talks about it. You’re not supposed to notice the subtle “Americanisation” at play (the American dream and its attendant complexities). But once you do, as a twice-immigrant (East to Britain, old England to New England), it’s hard to unsee. The roles aren’t assigned by policy, but by a deeper algorithm—one that sorts people into place based on centuries of sedimented power: race, class, culture, even aesthetics.

This isn’t new. In an earlier post (still unpublished), I described the world as a passenger aircraft: the visible stewards perform for the various tiers, while unseen staff in the cockpit captain the craft forward. Race and labor operate like cabin class—structurally invisible, casually enforced.

The genius of capitalism—if we’re being sarcastic—is that it doesn’t need to enforce this explicitly. Everyone is too busy striving for their next milestone to stop and ask why the system feels so natural. Upward mobility is the opiate. But look around long enough, and the patterns return. They always do.

In post-identity America, the real bias is not in loud proclamations, but in quiet correlations. Where you stand in the café—front or back—still says more than it should.