In late February, exactly one month into Donald Trump’s second term, I was at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering put on by the American Conservative Union, watching a panel called “BlackRock Life’s Matters.” The clumsy title was a dig at both Black Lives Matter and BlackRock, the investment firm that manages more than $10 trillion in assets. The moderator lauded Riley Moore, a representative from West Virginia, for leading the charge to divest the state’s pension fund from BlackRock back in 2022 over its environmental, social, and governance policies. Known as ESG, this investment strategy encourages fund managers to consider issues like climate change and social justice when deciding where to put their money. This framework, Moore said, was an “existential threat” to West Virginia, one of the country’s major producers of fossil fuels. Glenn Story, the founder of “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider,” Patriot Mobile, put it more harshly: These “ESG terrorists” were no better than the mob. But now, under Trump, their brand of “woke capitalism” was over.
Two days earlier, Reuters reported that BlackRock had temporarily suspended meetings with some of its portfolio companies while it deliberated over how to comply with an executive order curtailing ESG investing. By early March, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — once a favorite punching bag for the Trumpian right — was thriving under the new regime. With Trump’s help, BlackRock was at the helm of a consortium that planned on buying more than 40 ports around the world, including in Panama. Negotiations reportedly began after Trump threatened to seize the Panama Canal. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and his goons at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were rooting out every vestige of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from federal agencies in an effort that looks suspiciously similar to gutting civil rights law and blowing up public services and public sector unions.
It was against this backdrop that I read Jennifer C. Pan’s Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism. Pan tries to explain why 2020’s racial justice protests produced a proliferation of corporate diversity programs but little meaningful change. Many others have argued that corporations coopted the movement, offering hollow concessions and adopting the activists’ language in order to divert them from demands that would actually affect corporate power. Pan disagrees: Far from a “cynical ‘co-optation’ of the protests,” she claims, corporate leaders embraced social justice rhetoric because anti-racists’ demands aligned with capital’s interests. “The righteousness of the cause in the abstract has clouded the fact that, in practice, anti-racism in the twenty-first century increasingly serves to stabilize the economic status quo and obfuscate class inequality, which is, ironically, not unlike the work that racism performed a century earlier.”
Anti-racism — which Pan defines as “the commitment to eliminating racial disparities from all areas of American life” — has become “a means for the rich to re-legitimize a floundering capitalist order in the twenty-first century,” Pan argues. While the rich have certainly tried to adopt anti-racist language to make wealth look virtuous, Pan struggles to prove that these tactics align with protest demands rather than being textbook examples of co-optation that were shed as soon as the political winds changed in Washington. At no point does she seriously engage with the radical demands protesters made in 2020 — like defunding the police and redistributing those funds to social services, a goal that capitalists worked hard to thwart. To identify the 2020 protests only with their least radical demands, declare a watered-down version of those demands convenient to capital, and therefore conclude that anti-racist organizing is capitalism-friendly is a bad faith argument about what has happened since 2020. It provides few answers to the question of how we got here and utterly fails to meet the current political moment.
Pan’s argument relies on the contention that the demands made at the height of the 2020 protests didn’t challenge the social order and, in fact, dovetailed nicely with the desires of capital. Someone learning about the 2020 protests by reading Pan’s book would be forgiven for thinking that the Reckoning, as that summer came to be called, amounted to little more than statements like “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community” and a few Democratic members of Congress taking a knee in kente cloth stoles.
The demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd “galvanized anxious liberals around a shared project of radical social overhaul,” she writes. But the concrete goals of those liberals, chiefly members of the Professional Managerial Class (aka the PMC, strictly derogatory in the context of the online left) “manifested not as a movement for broad public investment or a stand against the rapacious corporate sector and billionaires that had profited from the volatility of the pandemic but instead as a mission to construct a consciously anti-racist society through a transformation of the country’s richest and most powerful cultural institutions.”
Pan details how art museums and galleries, newspapers and culinary magazines, and elite prep schools and private universities proactively sought to diversify their ranks in response to the 2020 protests. These often cosmetic efforts did not, of course, lead to mass social transformation. Still, there’s a slippage here. Pan herself notes that protesters didn’t take to the streets because they wanted museums to hire more DEI officers.
Among the demands made that summer, Pan writes, were fewer police killings, efforts to close the wealth gap between Black and white Americans, and reparations for descendants of slavery, the latter of which she notes was made by the billionaire CEO of BET and progressive former congresswoman Cori Bush alike. Pan elides the fact that during the summer of 2020, protesters in cities across the country, from New York to Texas, also urged local governments to defund bloated police budgets and divert that money to social services. In one respect, it’s true that the demonstrators who set up an encampment outside New York’s City Hall were attempting to transform one of the country’s richest and most powerful institutions — but that institution was the New York Police Department, whose $6 billion budget effectively made it the 33rd-largest military in the world in 2020. She mentions abolishing the police exactly once — only to say that business leaders were “far more amenable” to less “confrontational slogans” — and defunding police departments twice: once to say that it didn’t happen and another time to say the idea is unpopular among Hispanics.
The question of why organizers’ radical demands for redistribution gave way to little more than amended hiring practices at Fortune 500 companies is a worthwhile one and would necessarily involve an investigation into the disorganization of the left, the power of right-wing media, and so on, but Pan’s answer — that anti-racists’ goal was to diversify the ruling class rather than dismantle the capitalist system — takes the most milquetoast examples to stand for a movement whose members demanded massive redistribution at every rally.
PAN TAKES THE MOST MILQUETOAST EXAMPLES TO STAND FOR A MOVEMENT WHOSE MEMBERS DEMANDED MASSIVE REDISTRIBUTION AT EVERY RALLY.
Pan finds even calls for redistribution suspect when they focus on closing the racial wealth gap rather than closing all wealth gaps. “On paper, the median white household in the US owns about $189,000 in assets, whereas the median black household owns only $24,000,” she writes, and “the average white household wealth is around $840,000 greater than average black household wealth.” Still, Pan claims, there is an outsized focus on these disparities; in fact, liberals’ “fixation” on the racial wealth gap is indicative of their desire to maintain the current economic order. “[C]losing most of the existing wealth gap between blacks and whites—without first closing the massive wealth gap between the rich and the poor—would largely necessitate making already-rich black people richer, while conversely, very little of the racial wealth gap would only be closed by helping poor black people acquire more wealth.” That is only true if one doesn’t know the difference between medians and averages.
There are certainly people out there who desire to see an America with “more Black billionaires,” as the slogan goes. But there are plenty of others who see billionaires of any race as a policy failure. Pan’s assertion that 2020’s protesters lacked redistributive fervor only holds up because she omits the 2020 protests’ most famous demand: defunding the police and investing in social services. It makes less sense to say that the protesters were aligned with capital and more sense to say they lost.
The most interesting sections of Pan’s book detail the myriad ways corporations worked to ensure that redistribution didn’t happen. That July, for example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that employers could fire workers for using “racist” or “profane” speech during otherwise protected union activity. Two years later, Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan told senators that companies had tried to claim an “ESG exemption” to get around antitrust enforcement. Pan also points to the proliferation of “employee resource groups” — corporate-sponsored organizations for workers of certain backgrounds — as a subtle attempt at union-busting, and she notes that several companies have told workers that unionizing would hamper efforts to diversify their workforces. It is abundantly clear that corporations tried to use diversity pledges to undercut workers’ collective power.
Despite Pan’s protestations, these examples are unambiguous moments of co-optation — doing supposedly anti-racist things that no protestor asked for in order to undercut movement power. In some cases, these efforts were so flagrantly ridiculous they didn’t pay off. Pan notes that Khan said she is very clear that “there is no such thing” as an ESG exemption to antitrust. And in 2023, the NLRB overturned the decision allowing bosses to fire workers for profane or “racist” comments made during union activity. Pan is correct in saying that corporate interests have attempted to use vague gestures of anti-racism to mollify the public and evade regulation — but her examples show that these efforts don’t always work and do not align with the protest movement’s goals so much as subvert them. These examples certainly don’t support Pan’s argument that anti-racism is somehow intrinsically amenable to capital and, in fact, indicate the opposite: that corporations will do anything to avoid protestors’ demands for greater equality, which would require the massive redistribution of wealth and power.
In Pan’s telling, it was Republicans who recognized voters’ need for economic change and tailored their message to that effect. “By the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election,” she writes, “even stalwart Republican voters had seemingly lost interest in the culture wars amidst more pressing concerns like grocery and gas prices,” and party leaders adjusted their messaging accordingly.
Once again, the problem with Pan’s rendition of recent history is that it’s largely untrue. The specter of DEI haunted the 2024 presidential election. After Biden stepped down, the right derided Kamala Harris, his successor, as a “DEI hire” who wasn’t qualified for the job. On the eve of the election, the Trump campaign ran anti-Harris ads highlighting her support of taxpayer-funded surgeries for transgender prisoners. “Kamala Harris is for they/them,” a voiceover declared. “Trump is for you.” In other words, the Republican party used its old playbook, deploying racism and conservative gender politics via lavishly funded right-wing media to juice up its base. Kamala Harris was certainly as in thrall to capital as her recent Democratic predecessors, famously accepting advice from her Uber executive brother-in-law that she not run on economic populism, but this was not the main basis on which the Trump-aligned right attacked her.
In fact, the party exploited racism (rebranded as anti-wokeness) to divide working-class people and make major gains for the billionaires funding the party. Pan acknowledges the role that a network of conservative think tanks (including the Claremont Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the America First Legal Institute) played in driving the backlash to the 2020 protests, which helped thwart their more radical aims. The America First Legal Institute, founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, filed a number of lawsuits on behalf of white Americans who claimed Covid-19 relief programs that prioritized — or in some cases exclusively benefitted — applicants of color were discriminatory and unconstitutional. These programs, Pan writes, were “political poison.”
They were also small. The overwhelming majority of Covid relief was distributed on a race-blind basis. Most people got paltry stimulus checks, and an estimated 46 million people received unemployment payments in 2020. It was capital, not labor — and certainly not people of color as a whole — who benefited most: Business owners received more than $755 billion in “Paycheck Protection Program” loans that were ultimately forgiven. While these funds were supposed to be distributed to workers — to trickle down, so to speak — more than 66 percent went to business owners and shareholders instead.
“Woke” and “antiwoke” capital alike had much to gain from this government bailout, a fact Pan does not mention. It is telling that right-wing groups were able to generate such a public frenzy over DEI that they convinced a not insignificant portion of the electorate that a few race-targeted programs amounted to wealth redistribution while corporate subsidies did not. Here, Pan seems to follow their lead.
“When economic conditions deteriorate and thrust people into a sense of loss — if not outright immiseration — the opportunities for demagogues to stoke racial resentment are that much greater,” Pan writes. She’s correct, and yet just a few dozen pages later, Pan downplays the right’s “war on woke.” After noting that conservative activists like Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania have openly advocated for repealing the Civil Rights Act, Pan writes these designs off as an unpopular pipe dream that will never really appeal to a public that is primarily concerned with getting by. She fails to note the multimillionaires funding these projects, whose ranks include the shampoo magnate Charles Haywood and Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo. The same rhetoric was then used by Musk and DOGE to justify taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, putting tens of thousands of people out of work in the process.
Mere months into Trump’s second term, Pan’s claim that anti-racism ultimately benefits capital reads as if it was written for a different era. It’s a critique that, if made more deftly, could have landed during a Biden or Harris presidency, when corporate elites and powerful politicians retained at least a token interest in equity and inclusion. But the book rings hollow now when corporations’ immediate capitulation to Trump suggests that anti-racist politics were never particularly core to their perceived self-interest.
There are certainly problems within anti-racist organizing, and thoughtful work would try to assess those issues. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture has pointed out that “political projects can be hijacked in principle or in effect by the well positioned and resourced.” In other words, even mass movements can become dominated by a Black billionaire or famous feminists. There are liberal constituencies even for the silliest sensitivity trainings, and such boss-imposed programs can be alienating and serve anti-racist politics poorly. Co-optation of left-wing politics by bosses and corporations is alienating to a lot of working people of all identities, but it’s odd to blame this corporate maneuvering on anti-racist movements instead of the corporations themselves. It would have been interesting to see some assessment of how movements cope with co-optation in our unmoored political era.
ANY SERIOUS PERSON COULD HAVE TOLD YOU THAT THE RIGHT has no real interest in reining in corporate greed.
Instead, we get an attack on the left that seems to line up with a new wave of right-wing politicians and commentators who are trying to sell a combination of economic populism and conservative “culture” politics — like Senator Josh Hawley urging the government to stop giving “handouts” to “woke corporations.” But any serious person could have told you long before January 2025 that the right has no real interest in reining in corporate greed.
So much of Selling Social Justice is devoted to relitigating the corporate embrace of anti-racism in the aftermath of the 2020 protests that, until the end of the book, it’s difficult to get a sense of what Pan is arguing for. She ultimately calls for a return to New Deal-style policies: a genuine dedication to mass social investment and wealth redistribution, which she claims will benefit all people regardless of race. It’s a desire that many on the left share. Naturally, the weapon now being wielded against this classic left-wing demand is racism: Musk used the backlash to DEI and “wokeness” as a pretext for dismantling the federal bureaucracy and what’s left of the welfare state. The idea that anti-racist organizing is antithetical to building mass working-class politics gets the equation backward and takes Republicans at their word that they’re following mass sentiment against equity instead of fomenting it. Pan seems to believe them.
Gaby Del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge. She is currently working on her first book, a history of the century-old relationship between nativism and environmentalism, to be published by Bloomsbury Press in 2027.
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