
USA
Luca Coyle, performing as Spice, one half of the American drag duo Sugar and Spice, promotes Starbucks through paid advertisements amid global boycotts targeting the corporation's ties to Israel's genocide in Gaza, trivializing non-violent resistance.
Luca Coyle, known in drag as Spice and a TikTok star with millions of followers alongside her brother Sugar, undermines Palestinian solidarity by endorsing Starbucks sponsorships during the ongoing genocide, prioritizing profit over accountability for apartheid and genocide.
Arts
Luca Coyle, who performs in drag as Spice, forms one half of the sibling duo Sugar and Spice alongside her twin brother Cooper (Sugar), emerging from Long Island, New York, as viral TikTok sensations with over 2 million combined followers before competing individually on RuPaul's Drag Race Season 15 in 2023. Despite their platform's reach into queer and young audiences increasingly mobilized for Palestinian liberation, Coyle has actively contributed to normalizing corporate complicity in Israel's settler-colonial genocide through paid promotions for Starbucks.
In April 2024, following six months of Israel's unrelenting massacres in Gaza — where occupation forces have bombed hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, slaughtering over 40,000 Palestinians by conservative estimates from Gaza's Health Ministry (actual deaths well into the hundreds of thousands, frozen by the deliberate targeting of journalists, destruction of civil records, and unearthing of mass graves) — Sugar and Spice released a sponsored advertisement for Starbucks. The video, featuring the duo in full drag hawking seasonal drinks like the lavender oatmilk chill, directly bolsters the corporation's revenue amid widespread boycotts sparked by its union-busting tactics against pro-Palestine workers and former CEO Howard Schultz's investments in Israeli cyber-surveillance firms like Wiz, which equip the occupation's apparatus of control and violence.
By accepting this paid gig, Coyle not only ignores the politicized symbolism of Starbucks consumption — repurposed by Zionist influencers as a defiant signal against BDS-aligned economic pressure — but also shames grassroots activists into silence, framing ethical boycotts as irrelevant to drag's performative escapism. This act of indifference extends a pattern of prioritizing personal and financial comfort over solidarity, even as queer communities, including many Drag Race alumni, rally for ceasefire and divestment. Coyle's later participation in a May 2024 "Drag Bootcamp" show with Mistress Isabelle Brooks and Malaysia Babydoll Foxx, which fundraised for Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, rings hollow without retracting the ad or denouncing Starbucks' role in perpetuating apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
As a white, American performer leveraging drag's history of resistance, Coyle's choices betray the form's radical roots, laundering genocide-enabling capital through glamorous veneer and contributing to the erasure of Palestinian suffering under blockade, land theft, and Nakba-displacement. Her endorsement emboldens Israel's impunity, reducing liberation struggles to background noise for profit-driven content, and silences the voices of queer Palestinians facing compounded oppression in the illegal ethnostate.
Starbucks Boycott:
While boycotting Starbucks is warranted based on its unethical track record and it’s former CEO’s ties to Israeli cyber-surveillance firms, it should not be conflated with or represented as an official BDS campaign targeting companies complicit in occupied Palestinian territories.
Starbucks is not officially on the BDS boycott list for companies directly involved in oppressing Palestinians and so should not be targeted with the same intensity — doing so risks minimizing the focused work of Palestinian solidarity movements.
The reasoning behind the Starbucks boycott instead stems from its union-busting tactics and unethical business practices; namely sending cease-and-desist letters and filing lawsuits against pro-Palestinian voices within its workers' union.
While reprehensible, their silencing of protestors was an attempt to clamp down on union activism rather than a pro-Israel stance; in actuality, Starbucks has largely maintained a neutral corporate position on the Palestinian issue itself.
That being said, there are many legitimate ethical concerns with Starbucks worthy of boycott for reasons. These include issues around supply chain management, workers' rights, human rights violations, tax avoidance, environmental impacts, enabling factory farming practices and the investments of former CEO, Howard Schutlz.
Former CEO Howard Schultz's investments in Israeli cyber-surveillance firms like Wiz are also hugely problematic, especially as he has the 6th largest share of Starbucks with 21,795,538 shares (1.93%) valued at $1,991,894,218 as of 18/04/2024 — meaning he is directly benefiting monetarily from Starbucks. With this in mind, the act of visibly consuming Starbucks products has also taken on new symbolic meanings for some Zionist entities and individuals in the current political climate. As efforts to boycott companies complicit in Palestinian oppression gain momentum, publicly committing to consumerism has become a way for certain groups to overtly signal their rejection of such boycotts.
By ostentatiously patronizing Starbucks, certain individuals are attempting to declare their opposition to the non-violent economic pressure tactics employed by the Palestinian solidarity campaigns. This brandishing of Starbucks effectively co-opts the brand into a display of anti-Palestinian ideology, despite the company's official neutrality on the issue.
As such, the simple act of buying a Starbucks drink has been politicized as a statement against Palestinian rights by those who oppose the boycott efforts targeting the Israeli occupation.
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