Are Black Lives What Really Matter to Companies?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/black-lives-matter-brands.html

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In the days and weeks after George Floyd’s death, demand in corporate America for communications strategists with even a passing fluency in a certain dialect of racial justice reached a conspicuous peak.

“We stand in solidarity with the black community,” Amazon declared unironically. “There remains an urgent need for action,” the N.F.L. announced vaguely. “We see you,” Gushers, the fruit candy, tweeted unsettlingly.

What ought one to make of such affirmations of allyship? Are companies taking a meaningful, if overdue, stand against racial oppression, or are they just protest-proofing their bottom lines? Does the answer to that question even matter? Here’s what people are saying.

The phenomenon of companies taking up political causes both is and isn’t new. After the Great Depression, conventional corporate wisdom held that companies had social responsibilities: They needed to make profits, of course, but they also felt an obligation to foster good relationships with their workers and local communities.

That consensus began to change in the last third of the 20th century, when the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman came to prominence. In a landmark New York Times Magazine article in 1970, he declared that the social responsibility of business was to increase profits for its shareholders.

That theory became the iron law that would govern American industry for the next 50 years. Recently, however, there’s been a resurgence of the old notion that companies might have a duty to serve more than their bottom lines. (Speaking of which, it has become increasingly common to hear executives talk of not one but two or three bottom lines: profit, people and the planet.) The starkest indicator of that sea change flashed last August, when more than 180 chief executives pledged to run their companies for the benefit of the environment, their employees and their suppliers, not just their shareholders.

But many people suspect such gestures are empty. For evidence of this, the Times economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman reports, look no further than the pandemic: Even as it delivers the most profound economic pain since the Great Depression, many of the same companies that signed the corporate responsibility pledge are furloughing employees, paying dividends to shareholders and provoking labor complaints from workers.

Similar accusations of cynicism are being leveled at corporate efforts to signify opposition to racism. In The Times, Max Lakin writes about how luxury brands such as Hugo Boss have commissioned artists to decorate their boarded-up retail stores with messages in support of the George Floyd protests.

“It’s not hard to identify a brand’s motivation here: wanting to soften the brutal optics of its own self-interest,” Mr. Lakin writes. Art can soothe, he says, but it can also work to pacify the kind of righteous rage that ignites revolutionary change. “This moment has, again, exposed the limits of corporate solidarity, designed more to defend shareholder integrity than agitate for social justice,” Mr. Lakin concludes.

Like politicians, corporations have a habit of adopting unpopular stances the moment they stop being unpopular. Unsurprisingly, for Black Lives Matter, that moment is now: Public support for the movement spiked in recent weeks, having just crossed over the 50 percent threshold last month. Companies like Ben & Jerry’s, which publicly endorsed the movement in 2016, are an exception that proves the rule.

But even if brand support of Black Lives Matter is self-interested, it’s still significant, writes Bree Hurst, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, at The Conversation. “It’s easy to dismiss these statements as low-cost tokenism or politically correct wokism,” she says. But even if they end up benefiting companies’ bottom lines, it matters that brands are choosing to shine a light on systemic injustices rather than being passive spectators.

What’s more, she adds, the decision to take overt political stances still isn't risk-free. Black Lives Matter, however much ground it’s gained, is still opposed by some 30 percent of the country.

Whether motivated by profit or principle, companies must offer more than racial justice rhetoric, writes Janice Gassam at Forbes. “While it is important for your company to not remain silent during these tumultuous times, it’s hard to distinguish performative allyship from authentic and genuine intentions that will lead to actual change,” she says. What’s needed, she argues, is action.

What kind of action? In The Washington Post, Shaun R. Harper, a business professor at the University of Southern California, offers a list of what companies need to do to truly root out anti-blackness in the workplace: Recruit more black workers and ensure they have equitable opportunities for promotion, routinely assess and improve the workplace “racial climate,” mandate companywide education on a range of “diversity and inclusion topics,” invest in black employee network groups, ask black workers for suggestions about how to make the workplace less racist, and hold the company accountable for acts of anti-blackness.

“Anything short of this will weaken the credibility of the values they’re now so loftily proclaiming,” he writes.

Many consumers are also demanding that companies “put their money where their mouth is,” as Terry Nguyen writes for Vox. “All over social media, consumers are repeating the mantra ‘open your purse’ to these corporate platitudes and vague statements of solidarity,” she says. “The intent of these messages is clear: Donate money to organizations that aim to fix these systemic issues, instead of just speaking about them.”

Consumers are also aware now that many companies are guilty not just of apathy but of hypocrisy, Amanda Mull writes for The Atlantic. “Many large companies in the U.S. might feel comfortable invoking the Black Lives Matter movement when there’s little else appropriate for them to say, or acknowledging that racism exists when it’s all anyone’s talking about,” she says. But in many cases, the diagnostic language companies use to describe injustice is cunningly exculpatory, obscuring the extent to which its corporate speakers serve not merely as fellow tenants in the structure of American racism but also as load-bearing walls.

When Reddit released a statement of support for the George Floyd protests, the former Reddit executive Ellen Pao responded, “I am obligated to call you out” and pointed to the company’s own record of profiting from white supremacist speech. “You don’t get to say B.L.M. when Reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long,” she said.

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, announced that the company would devote $100 million (or about .006 percent of its market capitalization) to promoting racial equality. At the same time, Apple is facing a lawsuit from Congolese families who say that their children were killed or injured while mining cobalt that Apple uses in its devices.

Just two months before Amazon published its statement of support for “the fight against systemic racism,” company executives — including Jeff Bezos and Jay Carney, a former press secretary in the Obama administration — met to discuss a public relations strategy to discredit a black employee who was fired after leading a walkout at a Staten Island distribution warehouse by smearing him as “not smart or articulate,” Vice reported.

[Related: “Empty statements like Amazon’s show black lives only matter to big business when there’s profit to be made”]

Much of the demands being made of corporations are reformational, not revolutionary, Ross Douthat argues in The Times. In his view, it is precisely because these demands are relatively unthreatening to power that corporations are even attempting to comply with them.

“It’s not that corporate America is suddenly deeply committed to racial equality; even for woke capital, the capitalism comes first,” he writes. Rather, it’s that anti-racism as a cultural curriculum is relatively easy for the proverbial establishment, be it corporate or cultural or political, to accommodate.

“The idea that you need to retrain your employees so that they can work together without microaggressing isn’t Marxism, cultural or otherwise,” he says. “It’s just a novel form of Fordism, with white-fragility gurus in place of efficiency experts,” he says. The result desired, it would seem, is not the abolition of the ruling class but simply a more diverse one.

But as Mr. Douthat notes, there are serious critics of structural racism who envision more profound change. Take, for example, Robert L. Johnson, who called this month for the American government to close the yawning racial wealth gap with a $14 trillion reparations program: That sum of money, he estimated, is what is owed to the descendants of slavery, which he called “the largest illegal wealth transfer in this nation’s history.” Mr. Johnson is not a Marxist professor at Harvard or a writer at The Atlantic; he is the co-founder of BET.

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

“As big corporations say ‘black lives matter,’ their track records raise skepticism” [The Washington Post]

“The Limits of ‘Diversity’” [The New Yorker]

“Addressing inequality requires more than consciousness raising” [The New Republic]

“Corporate America Says Black Lives Matter. It Needs to Hold Up a Mirror.” [The New York Times]