Democrats heard our message of racial justice. When will corporations listen?
In politics, you know your voice matters when people in power first start repeating what you say, and then start doing what you say. In the Democratic party, racial justice movements now matter. We just witnessed two debates in which candidates vied to pronounce their commitment to the ideas defined by a peoplepowered vision of racial justice: reparations, ending mass incarceration, universal health insurance, community investment, and reining in the profiteering of corporations from Wall Street to big pharma. Candidates now promote these ideas as both necessary and possible because social movements made them do it: giving politicians bold policies and plans, and holding politicians accountable to fighting for them.
Radically challenging the status quo is the new status quo for Democrats, and it was a long fight to shift the norm. Trump’s racism didn’t get these candidates to respond to issues of race. The power of social movements did.
But in the corporate sector, the voices of racial justice do not yet matter nearly enough. This last week was a painful reminder. There are several major corporations based in or around Baltimore. What have they done as Trump attacked their home and leaders? Lockheed Martin has cozied up to Trump even more than a typical military contractor. Marriott is hosting the House Republican annual retreat later this year. Sinclair Broadcast Group has been essentially running Trump ads across the country under the guise of “news commentary”. (Their comrades at Fox News gave Trump the idea of how to attack Congressman Elijah Cummings in the first place.) The Under Armour chief executive posted a company-promoting pat on the back for Baltimore, the meekest of objections.
These corporations, and so many more beyond Baltimore, remain Trump enablers. And they all make this country more dangerous for the millions upon millions of people of color who live in it, work in it and make it what it is.
But we can build the power necessary to change corporate behavior if we take the right lessons from how we’ve changed Democrats’ behavior. In 2016, the voices of racial justice did not yet matter enough to force real change. People had to interrupt candidates on stage just to be heard, and then vigorously defend themselves against white liberals and hostile media pundits for doing so. Even though those voices were undeniably present, we still didn’t have the power to force candidates to change. But we kept organizing, we kept building our movement and we kept winning seats at the table.
It was your voice. It was millions of people taking action to demonstrate that racial justice is a path to solving our biggest social, economic and environmental problems: recording anti-black attacks on cellphones; getting educated and educating friends; forming and strengthening local organizations that could hold police accountable; rejecting biased media and fighting for accurate representation; identifying bias in hospitals and schools and forcing a reckoning to change the cultures of those institutions; and ushering in candidates who ran on an explicit racial justice agenda. All of these actions and more made racial justice matter.
Democratic candidates are now asking us about what they should say, and saying it. They are hiring racial justice movement leaders. They are proposing policies – on the House floor, not just the debate stage – to bring long-denied equity to our economy and our communities. When it comes to elected officials like district attorneys, progressive candidates in a dozen cities are not just saying what we want them to say, they are also doing what we want them to do: driving through major reform and showing America that ending mass incarceration is possible to achieve, necessary for justice and immensely valuable for everyone.
They are not only making the fight against racism the norm, they are working to make achieving racial justice the norm.
But when it comes to corporations, we are still at the beginning stages of accountability, and corporations largely work against racial justice. Starbucks responded to a racist incident in their store with racial sensitivity training – a start. Corporate CEOs dropped out of Trump’s business councils in response to our movement, so much so that he disbanded it – a start.
Yet corporations’ silence is louder. Every moment they don’t respond, and every day they remain silent, they endanger all of us. We must disrupt the norm that allows companies to stay quiet when the candidates they support are scapegoating people of color and doing us harm. And we must be able to reduce the influence that corporations have over writing the rules we live by when it comes to healthcare, tech, banking, criminal justice, energy and everything else – ending their ability to discriminate against people of color and cause us harm, whether as employees, customers or communities affected by their actions.
That requires building the power to hold politicians accountable for enabling the injustice of corporations, and also building the power to hold corporations accountable for enabling the injustice of politicians. And that will take a movement. Interrupting corporations in big public moments, as we did with Democrats. Making the media scrutinize the actions of corporations from the angle of racial justice, as we did with Democrats. Forcing politicians to rein in and reject corporations that do not embrace racial justice, just as we got voters to reject Democrats who do the same.
In the general election, the voices of corporations will matter. In any effort to create equity and justice in society, the actions of corporations will matter. We can influence what they say and what they do – and make racial justice matter – if we take our movement for corporate accountability to the next level, changing the rules and norms for how corporations do business because our voices are too strong, too many and too widespread to ignore.