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Stop “wokewashing.”
The CIA and Nike ads are part of a wave of campaigns lining up behind social justice initiatives. We might look at this as evidence of success. If a multinational company speaks out in defense of Black people organizing, and the U.S. foreign intelligence agency promotes diversity in career advancement, maybe it’s a sign that social justice initiatives are winning — or have already won.
Happy Wednesday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Corporations pledged billions to racial equity initiatives, but most of that money hasn't been seen. But there are many other ways to feign solidarity for the sake of profit. Today's newsletter unpacks the concept of "wokewashing" and how marketing campaigns may cover more insidious actions.
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– Nicole
TAKE ACTION
Don’t accept progressive statements from powerful institutions at face value. Look at their present and historical practices within marginalized communities.
Ask yourself: is social justice language being used to help create the conditions for social justice? Or instead, is it being used as a substitute for real change?
Look beyond the rhetoric to support sweatshop workers and oppose American abuses abroad.
GET EDUCATED
By Andrew Lee (he/him)
This spring, one American employer posted a recruitment ad brimming with social justice sentiments narrated over swelling string music. A Latina mother talks of hee pride in having ascended the ranks of her organization. “I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial woman who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise,” she tells us. We watch her stride the halls of her workplace with a shirt reading “Mija, you are worth it” underneath a feminist icon with a raised fist.
“I am a proud first-generation Latina,” she says, “and an officer at CIA” (YouTube).
A different ad from last year opens with plain white text on a black background. “Don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America. Don’t turn your back on racism,” it reads. “Don’t accept innocent lives being taken from us.” Plaintive piano music plays.
“Don’t think you can’t be part of the change. Let’s all be part of the change.” The video, produced by Nike, ends with its iconic swoosh (YouTube).
The CIA and Nike ads are part of a wave of campaigns lining up behind social justice initiatives. We might look at this as evidence of success. If a multinational company speaks out in defense of Black people organizing, and the U.S. foreign intelligence agency promotes diversity in career advancement, maybe it’s a sign that social justice initiatives are winning — or have already won.
We should consider analyzing what’s going on beneath these inspiring words. As more and more institutions proffer social justice-inflected statements, many have been accused of “wokewashing,” or “cynically cashing in on people’s idealism and using progressive-orienting marketing campaigns to deflect questions about their own ethical records” (The Guardian). Read Nicole’s articles about the (mis)use of “woke” and pitfalls of corporate accountability statements.
We need to see if an institution’s actions match their rhetoric. Nike directs us to stand up for racial justice, even offering Colin Kaepernick a platform (Huff Post). But the company is infamous for subcontractors who pay poverty wages for work in horrifying conditions. Women making Nike sneakers in Vietnam regularly coughed up blood and fainted on the factory floor from heat and exhaustion (NY Times). An Indonesian union organizer was hospitalized after paid assailants attacked with machetes (Clean Clothes Campaign). Nike’s domestic support of racial justice is part of an effort to rehabilitate its image and increase its profits. According to one report, “the Nike brand is arguably stronger, thanks in no small part to the company being out in front in supporting Black Lives Matter” (Marketplace).
We should also doubt the CIA’s anti-oppression credentials. A decade after planning the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow the Cuban government (History), the CIA was involved with the horrific bombing of a Cuban civilian airplane that killed all 73 passengers on board (Daily Mail). They trained paramilitary death squads from Vietnam (Counterpunch) to Afghanistan (The Intercept), including one group that blew up dozens of civilians in a Lebanon car bombing (N.Y. Times). In the modern-day, the CIA runs documented torture programs out of secret prisons (N.Y. Times). As part of the ongoing “War on Terror,” CIA agents have sexually violated prisoners, threatened to rape and murder their family members, intimidated them with power drills, and dumped freezing water on them as they were shackled to walls naked (U.S. Senate). These aren’t the actions of an intersectional feminist organization. But by portraying itself as progressive, the CIA can both facilitate recruitment of new hires as well as defuse liberal outrage and opposition to their actions, some of which are truly appalling.
Groups like Nike and the CIA wouldn’t even bother manufacturing “progressive” ads had it not been for decades of struggle from the racial and immigrant justice, feminist, and labor movements. The fact that they make the effort to pander to justice-minded people shows that organizing and advocacy and struggle works. The fact that they continue perpetrating abuses proves that we need to grow these movements even more. Wokewashed hypocrisy isn’t a reason to rest on our laurels. It’s motivation to support people-powered efforts to actually create an equitable world, a world in which liberal ads can’t distract from American sweatshops, secret prisons, and torture chambers because such things no longer exist.
Key Takeaways
In the past year, institutions like Nike and the CIA have put out pro-racial justice ads.
We need to investigate the practices and policies behind lofty rhetoric.
Nike and the CIA both use racial justice language for their own benefit while committing incredible harm to communities of color around the world.
RELATED ISSUES
6/3/2021 | Stop rainbow-washing.
3/26/2021 | Learn the definition of "woke.”
3/3/2021 | Know the difference between canceled and accountability.
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Boycott as a form of protest.
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Happy Tuesday!
Thanks to all the fervor yesterday around the action for the day. If you're reading this, you didn't unsubscribe! Grateful to have you here in this work.
Many of you asked about the responsibilities of Twitter and Facebook for moderating the rhetoric Trump shares online, perhaps because of the recent Boycott Facebook movement. It's fascinating to see this unfold, especially because of how important boycotting has been as a form of protest during the civil rights movement. As boycotting goes digital, and many of us are forced to protest from inside, there's an interesting relationship between social media, boycotting, and holding brands accountable.
So we're diving in to understand the historical context, and how we can use our dollars and voice to demand change. If these newsletters are supporting you, considering giving one-time on PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/month on Patreon.
Nicole
TAKE ACTION
Sign the petition to #StopHateforProfit to join the Facebook boycott.
Choose a harmful brand you've financially supported in 2020. Decide to stop buying from them. Invest into a more equitable company – preferably a BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ owned business.
GET EDUCATED
Major brands – like Starbucks, Unilever, Ford, and Coca-Cola – are pulling their advertising revenue from Facebook as part of a coordinated boycott (more via NYTimes). The #StopHateforProfit boycott, organized by the Anti-Defamation League (which I pointed to as a resource in yesterday's newsletter), encourages brands to pause their ad spend for the month of July, and lists ten actions for Facebook to take to improve how they handle racism on their platform (learn more, including a list of all participating brands, on the official website.
The major tech companies, including Facebook, have often cited "free speech" regarding hateful rhetoric. But things changed when Trump tweeted a series of incendiary tweets in late May in response to the George Floyd protests including the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," a term popularized by a chief of police in Miami referring to how to treat protestors in the midst of civil unrest in 1967, and considered to incite racial violence for years to come. Walter E. Headley was known for his "bigotry" and also said "we don't mind being accused of police brutality" (NPR).
“There is only one way to handle looters and arsonists during a riot and that is to shoot them on sight. I've let the word filter down — when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.
Walter E. Headley, the police chief of Miami, Florida in 1967 (Source)
Twitter – after years of calls to address Trump's tweets (example on Vox) – had just started to take action, marking tweets about mail-in voting during coronavirus as "potentially misleading" just days before (The Verge). In this case, they decided to shield the public from Trump's tweet's contents, warning that it invokes violence, but allowing users to click through and read it (The Verge). Trump posted this message on Facebook, too, but Facebook chose to do nothing, angering staff and causing walk-outs internally before tensions bubbled to today (MSNBC).
As a result, other tech companies have followed suit. After a public letter from over 650 subreddit leaders (The Atlantic), Reddit removed 2,000 hateful communities, including r/The_Donald, which promotes racism, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, and violent memes (The Atlantic). After encouraging racial profiling on its platform, neighborhood social media app Nextdoor removed a feature that allowed users to forward crime and safety posts from within the app to the police (NYTimes). YouTube banned white supremacists David Duke, Stefan Molyneux, and Richard Spencer – along with 25,000+ channels that violate hate speech policies (NY Post).
Facebook makes an estimated $70B each year on advertising – 98% of its annual revenue – particularly from small and medium-sized businesses, so it's unlikely this boycott will bankrupt them. But the lost revenue, especially during COVID-19, where many smaller businesses are cutting marketing budgets, caused Facebook stock to drop by 8% Friday (Bloomberg News) which caused Mark Zuckerberg to release a short statement and changes on Friday, June 26 (which wasn't well-received) (Slate).
It's important to note here that boycotts against corporation send a moral and financial message. Most businesses can tune out questions on morality. But money? Feelings on current events can be discarded as subjective, but cash is objective. And boycotts harm brand reputations, which have a much more lasting impact than short-term revenue loss. According to research by Brayden King at Northwestern University, most companies are worried enough about their reputations that they’ll change their behavior, even if the number of people partaking in the boycott is rather small (The Atlantic).
“It takes years and years to build a reputation, it takes one bad event to completely destroy that reputation”.
– Brayden King, Professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management
Boycotts have deep roots in our fight for justice. Many people remember the story of Rosa Parks, who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white male passenger. But the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed was key to creating lasting reform. The Women’s Political Council, a group of black women working for civil rights, circulated flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried in municipal court. This, followed by a front-page article from the local paper, rallied 40,000 people to boycott the bus system that day (History).
And for 381 days following, thousands of African Americans continued to boycott the buses, organizing carpools and relying on African American taxi cab drivers who'd charge the same bus fare for rides (History). Initially designed to convince the bus system – whose passengers were 75% Black – to create more equitable rules, the movement led to five women bringing the case to court. By June 5,1956, the Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment (History). The bus company lost 30,000 and 40,000 bus fares each day of the boycott and was desperate for it to end (more via nps.gov).
Local and national boycotts of the past decade have thrived because of social media (take the #BoycottNike situation in 2018, and #DeleteUber in 2017). So it's unprecedented to see social media being boycotted. But necessary. Because social media has become our digital neighborhood during this global pandemic. Most Americans get their news from social media (Quartz) and that news is more likely to be inaccurate (Pew Research Center). If social media is the soil of this generation's revolution, it needs to be a space where true change can grow. And that takes accountability for how people can use social media to spread racist and hateful messaging.
“Many Americans have spent months inside, on the internet, thinking about what it means to live online. Now many of them are in the streets, thinking about how to tackle racism. More than ever, it’s obvious that the internet is the real world. What happens here matters. What happens here happens out there”.
Kaitlyn Tiffany, staff writer at The Atlantic
So the question remains – should I be boycotting Facebook right now? Deactivating your account is unlikely to move this boycott forward. In fact, it may disconnect you from information and actions you can take in your local community, and the people you should be having conversations with. I'd recommend using it to stay in this work.
Instead, think about how you can boycott brands that are causing harm with your own dollars (like by supporting these Amazon warehouse workers calling for change). And remember that 99.7% of businesses in America are small businesses (via sba.gov). How can you put your money to work in your own community? And not just by divesting from harmful brands – but re-investing in the brands that work for you and the rights of all people. Lastly, make your reasons known by sharing publicly on social media, or sending a private message to the company (or both).
PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT
Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.
Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza