Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism

Journalist Pan debuts with a methodical dissection of how big business embraced anti-racist ideology in the aftermath of 2020’s racial reckoning, when corporate America dedicated “a staggering $340 billion” to “racial equity measures.” Dismissing the conventional wisdom that companies were simply cynically co-opting a popular movement, Pan instead lays out how the “dizzying array of personnel and products” now available through the “DEI complex,” as well as its singular focus on racism over economic inequality, align perfectly with the “neoliberal” status quo, serving as useful tools for undermining the creation of class-based coalitions—most unsettlingly as a cudgel against union organizing. In July 2020, for example, the National Labor Relations Board made a ruling, in the spirit of that summer’s calls for “antidiscrimination,” that employers could fire workers trying to unionize if they used racist or “profane” speech. Along the way, Pan revisits some of the more absurd hypocrisies of summer 2020 (such as “notoriously exploitative” Uber’s billboard announcing, “If you tolerate racism, delete Uber”) and provides an impressively researched counterargument to DEI thinking that harkens back to civil rights activists Bayard Rustin and Norman Hill’s 1974 warning that focusing solely on racial inequality over economics “will seriously divert the attention of society from difficult issues.” It’s an incisive call to ask who benefits from corporate social justice initiatives. (May)