US corporation giants, the ones that make up Wall Street and Silicon Valley, have pledged to offer their role in fighting systemic racism in the US. But as many of these multi-billion dollar companies cascade from America to the rest of the world, their influence is colossal. Their actions in fighting racism and defending the BLM movement is like an earthquake that is felt worldwide. A quake that has made its way across the Atlantic, right to our tv screens and billboards.
Brand activism has caught-on, becoming a popular way for huge corporations to showcase their own support of BLM. Like anything in life, some is real and some is, sadly, faked. As brand activism rose, so did scepticism as some of these brands, who, for years, have hid away from the topic of systemic racism, begin to add their support for such a movement. A movement that, before George Floyd’s murder, was too political to be brought into the limelight. Those brands who still sit in the position that BLM is ‘too political’, ‘too controversial’ or too anything do not deserve the dollars they make.
Some brands, though, act as if they care. They put on a front of activism for the adverts, the billboards and the public, but are they fighting the systemic racism within their own companies. Does the white man still sit above other employees? Has the companies CEO been a white man for the last few decades? Is there still a racial pay gap within their company? While the racial pay gap has been the smallest since 2012, there is still a 2% gap between the white man and ‘the other’.
Take Nike, who didn't shy away from standing up to racism with curating an advert playing on their own renowned slogan ‘just do it’ with ‘For once, Don’t do it’. Encouraging their customers to not ‘turn their backs on racism’ and to not ‘think this doesn't affect you’. While this is good, do not get me wrong, it is the least a multi-billion dollar company with worldwide influence can do. The same company that uses Chinese Muslims working in sweatshops to sew together the lining for trainers while the rich white man lines his own pockets.
Not convinced? Take Loreal, who published its black screen advert ‘Speaking out is worth it’, while simultaneously marketing and selling skin lightening products in numerous countries. The ‘Skin perfect, anti-fine lines + whitening cream’, is tag-lined as making skin ‘perfect’ through chemically stripping the melanin from thousands of its customers cheeks. It's hypocritical, considering the brand’s ‘activism’ for and ‘solidarity’ with its black customers.
Some words carry more weight than others, so the empty promises that Nike and Loreal offer don't convince me that they are making real changes within their own companies. This problem is not exclusive to this sports brand and cosmetic brand, but translates to many other companies, like Disney (who, until the long awaited new ‘Little Mermaid’ comes out, has created only one film with a black princess - The Princess and the Frog) Or even people like Mark Zuckerberg, who is probably worth more than some established companies themselves. He took to Facebook, of course, to write on George Floyd, systemic racism and other black individuals who were murdered at the hands of police brutality and racism. I could analyse his entire post, picking apart each line with a fine tooth comb, but I won’t. I will instead focus on what he doesn’t say. He fails to mention that Facebook employee’s defaced ‘Black Lives Matter’ posts and replaced them with ‘All Lives Matter’ slander. He fails to mention that only 2% of Facebook’s employees are black, with only 1% in the tech force. The $10 million Zuckerberg pledged to donate to BLM organisations is the least the $720 billion company can do, especially when the company's interior isn’t all that polished and ‘woke’ as it seems.
Think about those videos where someone shows 10 grains of rice that represents $1 and compares these mere grains to the mountain of rice that represents, say, $1 billion. Or the comparison that 1 million seconds is 12 days versus a billion seconds which is...31 years. Donating $10 million doesn't really break the bank for poor Zuckerberg and other billionaires alike. (In conclusion, eat the rich)
Anyway, the math doesn’t matter, but the principles do. Praising the mega-rich when they start contributing to and recognising the change that the BLM movement is making shouldn’t be a thing. We shouldn’t applaud companies who ‘speak out’, we should reprimand the companies that don’t.
Although, some did it right. Viacom, the father to MTV, Nickelodeon, CBS sports, Comedy Central and many others, halted its programming on these networks and replaced them
with a black screen reading ‘I can’t breathe’ in white writing, for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This might sound like old news, but as quickly as the black squares were deleted from Instagram pages and as fast as retweeting important information became a fad, people ‘forgot’ that racism is a thing. They forgot that the fight is not over just because certain brands become quiet once again.
As expected, Karen's complained that Nickelodeon's PSA scared, traumatised and frightened their white kids is which is, of course, terribly ironic as in the other 1,432 minutes of the day, these kids aren’t faced with this reality of brutality and murder. But the black kids raised on the next block are. Nickelodeon's PSA reminds me of how mouldable children really are, and how massive the impact of brand activism can really be.
Kids in the 21st century western world are pretty familiar with these massive companies like Nike, Nickelodeon and Facebook. Kids are spoon fed corporate capitalism and taught from young that brands have power. What makes these brands? People. People have power and it's the people at the top of these ladders that make the changes. It’s all well and good hash-tagging ‘blm’... but without change within the company by the people running the company, these empty gestures of activism are as futile as the ‘black square’ trend.
If you liked reading this piece, like the post and subscribe to Empathos blog <3
Comments