The following is an excerpt from the Jacobin Series book Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism by Jennifer C. Pan (Verso, 2025).
For progressives, the crescendo of corporate interest in social justice, particularly during 2020’s racial reckoning, has amounted only to a cynical co-optation of radical grassroots movements. “Rather than redistribution, redress, or reparations,” one Nation contributor wrote of the corporate response to the reckoning, “corporate America and the political elite alike embraced the language of identity to assure those making radical demands in the streets that political change might just come one chief diversity officer at a time.”
It’s true, on one hand, that business leaders have been far more amenable to measures like diversifying corporate boards and instituting companywide antibias trainings than they have been to some of the more confrontational slogans that arose from the protests — the call to abolish the police, for example. But on the other, 2020’s reckoning also revealed that line between “corporate” anti-racism and “radical” anti-racism is often very fuzzy indeed. There have, for instance, been a number of steadfast calls for reparations from the business sector that don’t look terribly different from what activists themselves have demanded. In 2020, Robert Johnson, the billionaire founder of BET, called for the federal government to pay $14 trillion in reparations to black Americans — the same figure included in several congressional reparations bills, including one introduced by progressive Cori Bush in 2023. The CEO of the private equity firm Vista Equity, which is valued at $96 billion, likewise said in an interview…
Auteur: Jennifer C. Pan
