A racist thing happened at Starbucks, but since nobody wants to say it aloud, I will. It wasn’t implicit bias, the benign sounding word that makes you feel as if you may have been racist, but didn’t mean it. As fashionable as the phrase may be, I don’t buy it. There is no such thing as implicit bias. There’s bias.

On May 29, Starbucks will close 8,000 locations to administer racial bias training for 175,000 of its employees. The move is a response to national outrage over the arrests of two black patrons while they were simply waiting for a meeting to begin at a Philadelphia coffee shop.

But racial bias training for employees is not enough to address the epidemic of discrimination by American companies.

This isn’t an epidemic of discrimination by American companies, but people being people, and they prejudge black guys as being a problem, just as cops prejudge them as being a threat. There’s nothing implicit about it. It’s as explicit as any other bias.

An experiment was conducted to see how hotel employees, because they’re in the hospitality service, treated inquiries based on the names used for the inquiries. It went as one would expect.

Hotel employees provided 20 percent more restaurant recommendations to white than to black or Asian people. Employees’ politeness also varied by race. When responding to white people, employees were more likely to address them by name and to end their emails with a complimentary close (e.g., “Best,” “Sincerely”) than they were when responding to black or Asian people. And employees were more likely to go “above and beyond” in their service: They were three times as likely to provide extra information — even when the initial inquiry was just about restaurants — to white than to black or Asian people.

There’s nothing implicit here. They treated blacks and Asians poorly. The could have treated them the same, as they all pay their hotel bills with the same color money plastic, but they didn’t.

Our research suggests that this belief — that a nonwhite person cannot or will not be a legitimate customer — can indeed worsen discrimination in service delivery. In a follow-up study, we emailed nearly 2,000 hotels and made a similar inquiry about local restaurants. But this time, in addition to varying the race of the inquirers, we varied whether they made clear their intention to stay at the hotel. Indeed, making customer status explicit helped reduce discrimination against minority people. These results are in line with the recent incident at Starbucks: We see that service workers do not apply the rule that every person is a potential customer deserving the same level of service.

Another takeaway is that when money is more clearly on the table, people figure out that they need to pretend to be more accommodating, so they know what being responsive means and just choose not to do it. Again, nothing implicit here. They know. They just don’t do it.

But what should be done about this explicit bias?

Instead of relying primarily on trainings to remedy bias, if they truly want to transform the way they serve customers, companies need to make structural changes. For instance, they should standardize scripts and provide employees with specific protocols for managing these situations. Such efforts can institutionalize norms of behavior for employees when they interact with customers.

Of course a one-day training session, most of which are nonsense anyway, isn’t going to change anything. But is the solution to create “standardized scripts” to homogenize and depersonalize treatment? Mediocrity may create the appearance of equality, but does it change anyone’s bias that the black guys waiting, and not yet buying,* in Starbucks are assumed not to be customers, but dudes you need to call the cops on?

I have a different prescription. Stop excusing basic prejudice under the rubric of “implicit bias.” Stop assuming the black guy is a criminal, or at least not good for business. Stop making discrimination a palatable and excusable state of affairs, and call out racism as racism, without some nice euphemism like “implicit bias” that can be fixed with a magic pill like training.

You only need a standardized script if you accept the premise that racism is acceptable and needs to be papered over to create the appearance of acceptance. Denying that racism is racism won’t stop racism. Treat the black guys as well, or as poorly, as you treat anyone else.

*Don’t bring up that they were told to leave and were trespassing. White people spend hours in Starbucks buying nothing and nobody suspects they’re up to no good, orders them to leave, calls the cops. This isn’t about whether a person should leave a private business when told to do so, but that this was extremely unlikely to happen but for their skin color.