A business selling Pride Month stickers in June can be seen as either a noble attempt to represent LGBTQ+ customers or a superficial, opportunistic move to boost profits. American corporations are on a perpetual merry-go-round of finding the next best advertising ploy. If a company’s target audience is vocal about police brutality, said company capitalizes on the current news and Black Lives Matter pins appear in their display cases the next day.
There is nothing inherently wrong with supportive merchandise. However, greedy corporations often pocket the profits made from these products, leaving nothing behind for equitable charities.
Social justice capitalism is a phenomenon where corporations and institutions embrace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives for profitability rather than tangible societal transformation. These symbolic gestures may represent hidden communities, but they often lead to resentment.
According to Nancy Leong, a law professor at the University of Denver, racial capitalism breeds racial resentment. When non-whiteness is exploited for self-preservation and financial gain, no amount of one-dimensional representation can make up for it. Racial tensions inflame when diversity is clearly being commodified.
In 2000, Diallo Shabazz, a Black student, discovered his face digitally plastered onto the back row of cheering fans in a University of Wisconsin admissions booklet — even though he never attended that football game. For 246 years, Black people were assigned monetary value and sold as enslaved commodities. There is an insidious recommodification of the Black body when institutions orchestrate fake photos to virtue signal inclusivity. If a university has to edit a photo to display diversity, there is likely little diversity in the first place. Predominantly white universities often tokenize the people of color to preserve their image.
Institutions are not the sole perpetrators of tokenization; public figures and politicians do it too. Donald Trump, the president-elect, is a seasoned racial capitalist. He goes out of his way to tweet photos of himself with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, positions Black supporters carefully behind him at his rallies and relies on the notorious Black friends’ defense. Yet he has demonized brown migrants, failed to appoint a Black woman to the federal judiciary, ignited the birther conspiracy around former President Barack Obama and called Charlottesville white supremacists “very fine people.”
Universities and politicians gain social capital from tokenism, indirectly profiting off of minorities. Corporations like Target and Bud Light, however, directly capitalize on marginalized identities with social justice capitalism.
In order to understand why social justice capitalism is counterproductive, one must understand how injustices — ideological and tangible — can be legitimately stopped. According to American philosopher Nancy Fraser, there are two primary methods of social justice: affirmative and transformative. Affirmative justice treats the symptoms rather than curing the disease. If a society devalues the queer identities, then the solution is to outwardly value it. However, pride parades and rainbow merchandise are no match for the idolized heterosexual, nuclear family unit.
Yes, representation can normalize stigmatized identities, but it can also grossly simplify people’s self-understanding, reducing the complexity of their lives to a brand. It intensifies the misrecognition of LGBTQ+ people by boxing queer people up with a rainbow ribbon.
Transformative justice, in lieu of superficial means, deconstructs the generative framework of injustice. Queer politics, for instance, eliminates the binary opposition between homo- and heterosexualities. Instead of distinguishing straight people from gay people, it rejects fixed categories of sexual identity and the otherization of gay people — it is anti-assimilationist. Instead of seeking societal value, it discards the heteronormative society that built the discrimination.
The issue is that expecting people to abandon fixed sexual orientations is asking them to completely forget their already ingrained worldviews. So, affirmation seems like the next best solution. Perhaps pride stickers can foster acceptance into seemingly hopeless places, but many of the corporations making the merchandise are not well-intentioned or committed to valuing minorities.
When Target’s sales dropped by more than five percent because they were selling “woke merchandise,” they took down displays from store shelves. When Bud Light faced a stark sales drop after transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney was featured in an advertisement, they fired the executives who spearheaded the marketing campaign. When these companies are monetarily hit, their compassionate facades dissipate. They ditch their social justice endeavors and revoke their allyship on a whim. Social justice capitalism is orchestrated for capitalist endeavors, not meaningful social change.
Giving money to apathetic, opportunistic corporations because they slapped an all bodies are beautiful sticker on a display case is naive. Considering the source is an irreplaceable tool when purchasing social justice merchandise. Black-owned, women-owned and/or queer-owned businesses have more ethical integrity than a Walmart. And material representation can only go so far. Getting in the weeds of lasting change will transcend the impact of a sticker on a laptop.
Isabella Ehring is an Opinion Intern for the fall 2024 quarter. She can be reached at iehring@uci.edu.
Edited by Zahira Vasquez and Mia Noergaard