THE LATEST FAD among some conservative pundits and propagandists is to bash corporate executives who use their positions to promote “politically correct” causes. They call it “corporate wokeness,” and they see it everywhere. However, this is not a new phenomenon.
In 1971, in the backwash of the 1960s, America was very much a country in crisis. Large swaths of our inner cities still bore scars left by the uprisings that followed the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A president elected on a promise to end the Vietnam War was widening it instead. Coca-Cola had the answer to all that trouble and strife. That year, the soda company assembled 500 young people of varied races and nationalities on a hilltop and filmed them singing, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” So “corporate wokeness” was born.
Twenty-nine years later, Coca-Cola paid millions of dollars to settle a federal court case accusing it of a historical pattern of systematically underpaying and otherwise discriminating against its Black employees.
In spring 2020, just a few days after a police officer murdered George Floyd, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Brian Lamb, the company’s global head of diversity and inclusion, issued a statement that “we are watching, listening and want every single one of you to know we are committed to fighting against racism and discrimination wherever and however it exists.” A week later, Dimon was photographed, with some bank employees, down on one knee in the Colin Kaepernick pose, presumably in an attempted display of solidarity.
Several months later, Dimon opposed a shareholder resolution that would have forced his company to undergo a racial-equity audit to root out discriminatory practices.
Shortly after George Floyd’s murder, the Twitter account of e-commerce giant Amazon, Inc., featured the following statement: “The inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people in our country must stop. Together we stand in solidarity with the Black community—our employees, customers, and partners—in the fight against systematic racism and injustice.”
Amazon then spent most of the next year waging an all-out campaign to prevent its mostly Black employees in Bessemer, Ala., from forming a union.
Corporations do whatever will make the most money for their executives and shareholders. If that’s redlining and union-busting, they’ll do it. When anti-racism seems like a good marketing strategy, they’ll do that, too.
The only surprise here is the people who sometimes fall for this ruse. In a 2020 article discussing Bernie Sanders’ universalist, class-based campaign, Columbia University critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw told The New York Times, “You basically have a moment where every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness ... even outdistancing what candidates in the Democratic Party were actually saying.”
Meanwhile, in the article “Labor Unions and White Racial Politics” (in the American Journal of Political Science), authors Paul Frymer and Jacob M. Grumbach crunched the numbers and found empirical evidence that union membership significantly reduces anti-Black attitudes among white workers. When people come together around their common interests, it seems, they also discover their common humanity.
No such evidence has emerged for corporate diversity statements or tweets.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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