‘Corporate America Has Failed Black America’

Mr. Walker, too, said the severity of this moment seemed to be shocking some companies into action. “Corporate America can no longer get away with token responses to systemic problems,” said Mr. Walker, who has been protesting in New York. “It is going to take a systemic response to sufficiently address this crisis that has been decades in the making.”

‘It’s complete B.S. It’s performative’

As brands rushed to align themselves with protesters over the past week, their words often rang hollow, undermined by their own actions.

Amazon called for an end to the “inequitable” treatment of black people. Yet the company has faced sustained criticism for poor working conditions and low pay. In March, it fired Christian Smalls, a black employee at a Staten Island warehouse who was demanding safer conditions while working in a pandemic, and the company’s general counsel disparaged him as “not smart or articulate.” Amazon has said Mr. Smalls violated its social distancing policy, and that the executive did not know he was black.

The commissioner of the National Football League, Roger Goodell, issued a statement saying the protests express “the pain, anger and frustration that so many of us feel.” But his organization has banned players — most of whom are black — from kneeling to protest police brutality, and the quarterback most identified with the gesture, Colin Kaepernick, has been effectively blacklisted. (On Friday night, Mr. Goodell appeared to reverse himself, saying, “We, the National Football League admit we were wrong” and adding, “I personally protest with you.”)

L’Oréal shared a post that read “Speaking out is worth it.” But three years ago, the makeup company dropped its first transgender model, Munroe Bergdorf, when she spoke out about racism after the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va.

“Most of these corporate statements were put together by the marketing team that was trying not offend white customers and white employees,” said Dorothy A. Brown, a law professor who studies economic injustice at Emory University in Atlanta. “It’s complete B.S. It’s performative.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/business/corporate-america-has-failed-black-america.html