Americans have been sold a version of social justice that fails to deliver.
Americans have been sold a version of social justice that fails to deliver
It’s not simply that big business has cynically co-opted an authentic grassroots uprising, but that an unwitting alliance exists between the main line of the racial justice movement and capitalism. In other words, capitalism has found a way to be antiracist without doing a thing to mitigate inequality, racial or otherwise.
87 companies on the S&P 100 released statements on racial justice; 79 pledged money to racial justice-related causes; 66 pledged to hire more diverse candidates; and 50 pledged to diversify their C-suites and boards. High-end gallerists open showrooms with all black staff and uptown Manhattan private schools have issued seemingly radical anti-racist manifestos. Budgets for DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) have ballooned. For all that commitment and spending, change has been fleeting for those at the bottom.
Using compelling journalistic prose combined with deep political analysis, Selling Social Justice investigates the rise and spread of contemporary racial justice ideology. In this critique from the left, Pan traces the evolution of seemingly radical ideas about race as they are integrated into the logic and policy of corporate America. And it is precisely the extent to which demands are adjusted to suit elite interests that they undermine the possibility of building a coalition capable of advancing distributive justice and greater equality.
The racial reckoning of 2020 has long since collapsed in a puff of corporate DEI initiatives. This book exposes how antiracism was always doomed to be another weapon in the arsenal of corporate power used to distract from the common oppression faced by workers of all races. -- Krystal Ball, co-host of Breaking Points
A must-read for anyone concerned with the limits of a nominally left politics in the US that has forsaken the pursuit of solidarity around interests and concerns that working people share broadly. It is a cautionary tale about how corporate and nonprofit sector influences have contributed to shaping our views of social justice and how to achieve it-with the effect of strengthening the reactionary right. Jennifer C. Pan's book is beautifully written, meticulously researched, and very intelligently argued. -- Adolph Reed Jr., author of The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
If you think DEI can help make American society more equal, Pan shows that the only people more mistaken than you are the ones who think getting rid of it will do the job instead. What the American people have been sold by both the neoliberal left and the MAGA right is a vision of social justice that, in making our relation to race and racism the fundamental problem, makes the fundamental solution-'a universalist conception of social welfare'-invisible -- Walter Benn Michaels, author of No Politics but Class Politics
Jen Pan is the co-host of the Jacobin Show (50,000 subscribers). She is a former staff writer at The New Republic and has written for the Nation, the Atlantic, Jacobin, and Dissent, and her work has been cited by New York Magazine, Gawker, Jezebel, Longreads, and other outlets.
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