Unjust, page 14
Professor Nicholas Christakis, Erika’s husband and the co-master of Silliman College, echoed his wife’s sentiments in a follow-up email: “[W]e believe strongly that our job is to help students to speak for themselves, rather than to speak for them. We want students of all stripes and ideologies to talk to each other, and we will try to foster an environment in which students can debate any issue with their peers.”
Shortly after this email was sent, students began organizing to have the Christakises fired. “Students gathered Thursday outside Yale’s main library to draw in chalk their response to recent events they say have confirmed that Yale is inhospitable to black students and to black women in particular,” the Washington Post reported. “There was so much coded language in that e-mail that is just disrespectful,” one student told the Post. Others were allegedly so traumatized that they contemplated withdrawing from Yale altogether. “They can’t stay in the master’s house,” said one student, who thus trivialized and appropriated the experience of American slaves.26
Determined to confront his accusers, Nicholas Christakis appeared before this irritated group of young students, a scene that was captured on video. One particularly agitated young woman berated Christakis and demanded that he remain silent through her emotional lecture. “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” she screamed. “By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master.”
“No,” Christakis replied calmly, “I don’t agree with that.”
“Then why the f—k did you accept the position!” his accuser yelled. “It is not about creating an intellectual space. Do you understand that? It is about creating a home here.”27
Six months later, both Nicholas and Erika Christakis resigned their posts.
The hysteria over appropriative Halloween costumes is not limited to adults who think they are still children. It’s being inflicted on actual children. In October 2017, the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan advised parents to teach their children about “the importance of cultural sensitivity.” Specifically, parents should tell their white daughters that it is inappropriate for them to dress as the Polynesian Disney character Moana. “If your kid wears a racist costume,” the piece read, “you’re kind of wearing it, too.”28 Steeping children in racial consciousness and teaching them that they are allowed to appreciate only one culture—their own—seems like a counterproductive way to combat racism.
The fabricated scourge of cultural appropriation extends beyond the college campus. In the spring of 2017, the artist Dana Schutz revealed her latest work in the Whitney Museum, part of a collection of paintings aimed at combating racism and poverty in America. Her portrait, titled Open Casket, features the likeness of the body of Emmett Till—the fourteen-year-old African-American who was falsely accused of offending a white woman and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, an atrocity that catalyzed the civil rights movement. Art critics liked it, but the social justice mob panned it. “This painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,” wrote the British critic Hannah Black in an open letter co-signed by forty-seven other artists. “White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.” Black and her co-signers demanded that the painting be taken down.29
The artist Parker Bright, calling the painting “an injustice to the black community,” accused Schutz of perpetrating “the same kind of violence that was enacted on Till.” Bright then displayed his own art at the Whitney—of the performance variety—when he allowed himself to be photographed standing in front of Schutz’s painting wearing a T-shirt that read “black death spectacle.”
The protesters charged that Schutz’s painting represents the “appropriation of Black culture by non-Black artists”—specifically, according to one blogger for The Root, “a white woman from Brooklyn.”30 Soon, the social justice league insisted that Schutz’s career be discredited along with her painting. Protesters called for the cancellation of a showing of her work in Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, even though the offending painting of Till would not be present.
To be fair, not everyone on the left thought this lashing out was a productive exercise. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith objected, as did the artist Clifford Owens. “I don’t know anything about Hannah Black, or the artists who’ve co-signed her breezy and bitter letter,” Owens wrote, “but I’m not down with artists who censor artists.”31 The social justice left had overreached, and the painting remained on display, but this movement’s demands for scalps are not always so unsuccessful.
For what may be the sorriest tale of misery resulting from the fanatical policing of cultural appropriation, we must journey to Portland, Oregon, to the little taco truck Kooks Burritos. This trendy pop-up brasserie was owned by two women who built a popular and profitable business from scratch. The business’s success would be its downfall.
The proprietors, Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly, confessed to a reporter that they came up with the idea for their business while on a trip to Mexico. They fell in love with the food, asked local chefs for their recipes and techniques, and replicated them in the Pacific Northwest to wild acclaim. The outrage that followed their success was hysterical even by the standards of the social justice left.
The media company Mic attacked Kooks and its proprietors as “white cooks bragging about stealing recipes from Mexico.” The Portland Mercury included Kooks on a short list of “white-owned appropriative restaurants,” adding that it was just one of many problematic restaurants “birthed as a result of curious white people going to a foreign country.”32 The restaurant’s reviews went south, so to speak, and the customers stopped coming. When the death threats started, Wilgus and Connelly shut down their business.
“Because of Portland’s underlying racism, the people who rightly owned these traditions and cultures that exist are already treated poorly,” read a triumphant column that ran in both the Mercury and on Mic's website. “These appropriating businesses are erasing and exploiting their already marginalized identities for the purpose of profit and praise.”33
Just a week after this story’s publication, the Mercury scrubbed this final attack on Kooks Burritos from its website: “It was not factually supported, and we regret the original publication of this story,” read the apologetic editorial note. Sure, a few lives were ruined and a journalistic outlet lost its credibility, but those clicks must have been pretty sweet.34
An Unethical Business Model
Anyone examining the modern social justice movement quickly encounters a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Which came first, a movement that is so myopically obsessed with identity that it can’t distinguish a legitimate case of discrimination from a ginned-up contretemps, or the media culture that exploits that obsession for profit? For clarity on this question, consider the rise and decline of Mic.com.
PolicyMic, a website targeting a burgeoning audience of news-consuming millennials, launched in 2010. Like many sites of that period, it cast a wide a net by publishing a lot of material, often with the help of “aggregation”—scraping content from other sites with bigger budgets and real reporters and writing some original opinion around it, thereby avoiding the legal mess associated with the outright theft of material. Many aggregators paid their staffers poorly, if at all, but they gave young writers a valuable platform. Their potential in the early age of social media—and it was often just potential—led to speculative ten-figure valuations and venture funding in the tens of millions of dollars.
PolicyMic was one of the more successful such sites. By 2013, it had found its niche as a left-leaning outlet catering to the growing obsession with identity, launching a section dedicated exclusively to Identitarianism and the traffic generated by that special brand of narcissism.
“At PolicyMic Identities, we aim to feature articles as thoughtful, complex, and unique as the stories of our generation,” read a job listing for that site. “We examine what it’s like to be a white woman of color, explore what it means to be a male feminist, talk back to the Pope as a young gay man, and reflect on how Abercrombie & Fitch failed you and other homeless youth.”35 Vital stuff.
The site expanded rapidly. By the end of 2013, it published almost a hundred posts per day, generating tens of millions of unique visitors and boasting a network of thousands of writers. That success was reduced to a formula, and that formula was built around the idea that social justice activism was fueled by anxiety, a preoccupation with oneself, and the need for a constant stream of new enemies.
In 2014, PolicyMic rebranded itself “Mic” and dedicated its staff to chasing whatever traffic Facebook had sent its way the day prior. “I think a lot of people in today’s day and age want to know, ‘What are we supposed to be outraged about?’ ” a former Mic staffer told the liberal website The Outline. “Mic realized earlier than most places that they could commodify people’s feelings about race and gender.”36
Mic relied on rote efforts to stoke anger—anything that encouraged the perception that the Anglo-American West, in particular, is steeped in racial injustice. “ ‘Minority Report’ Is Real—And It’s Really Reporting Minorities,” read one typical headline. In another, a description in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph of the first female head of the BBC as a “mother of three” was described by one no doubt childless Mic reporter as “sexism at its worst.” When the comedian Sasheer Zamata left NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Mic described the departure as a sign that “TV’s race and gender problems are more systemic than ever.” Viewing race through the prism of a late-night comedy program, Mic brought the complex history of racial tensions and disparities in America down to a level that it believed young readers could grasp—and, more importantly, share on social media.
In 2017, Mic began to shed disillusioned staffers and shifted from text to the production of video content, which was more likely to generate a return on investment. Among the new ventures was a comedy along the lines of Chappelle’s Show, “except it’s hosted by a trans woman of color.” Presumably, this comedy host with a challenging identity would possess a modicum of talent. But that consideration seemed to be, at best, an afterthought.
The effort to shoehorn identity politics into every facet of modern life extends beyond click-farms on the internet. “Why is science so straight,” the New York Times asked in September 2015.37 “Why are our parks so white?” the paper of record queried three months earlier.38 The following year, the Washington Post explored “Discomfort food: Using dinners to talk about race, violence, and America.”39 Some of this kind of baiting is provocative, challenging, and valuable. Most of it is not.
Corporate Social Justice
There was a time within living memory when corporations were obliged to avoid politics. Given the relatively even divide in America between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, taking a side meant alienating half your potential clientele. Your job is to sell widgets, not change the world. That maxim is dead and gone. The pressure on corporate America to comply with the shifting dictates of social justice orthodoxy is immense, and corporate identity now includes—indeed, is often incomplete without—the appropriate politics. Usually, it is the politics of the left.
In 2016, the state of North Carolina passed a controversial law requiring people to use the public restroom corresponding to their sex, regardless of their “gender identity.” Many people viewed the law as discriminatory—including the future Republican president, Donald Trump. “There have been very few complaints,” Trump told NBC’s Today when asked if he preferred the status quo ante to post-transgender bathroom law. “North Carolina did something—it was very strong—and they’re paying a big price. And there’s a lot of problems,” he added.40
Trump was right. Immediately after the law was passed, the film and television production studio Lionsgate canceled a project scheduled to film in the Tar Heel State. PayPal followed suit by withdrawing from a deal that would have produced four hundred new jobs. A few days later, Germany’s Deutsche Bank dropped its plan to open a technology development center that would have brought 250 new jobs to North Carolina. The NBA and the NCAA announced that games scheduled to take place in North Carolina would be played elsewhere. Two months later, sixty-eight companies—including Apple, Nike, and American Airlines—filed a court brief along with the Human Rights Campaign seeking to block the implementation of the “Bathroom Bill.” In the end, North Carolina lost more than $630 million to the backlash.41
The law was not only financially costly but also a mess for the local Republican Party. Even though Trump beat Hillary Clinton by nearly 4 percentage points in North Carolina, the incumbent Republican governor was run out of office. Within three months of his inauguration, North Carolina’s new Democratic governor signed a repeal of the Bathroom Bill.
Anyone who thought North Carolina’s bill was unjust would have a favorable view of the pressure applied by corporate America. This is, however, hardly the only instance in which corporate America hopped off the referee’s chair and got into the game.
In 2016, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced efforts to ensure its drugs would not be used in executions in states that impose capital punishment by lethal injection.42 Marc Benioff, the chief executive of the cloud-computing giant Salesforce, mounted a crusade to compel Indiana and Georgia to abandon plans to pass state versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—a law that allows individuals and the owners of closely-held companies to avoid violating their religious principles.43 In 2015, Apple spent enormous sums lobbying in favor of the international Paris Agreement on emissions. Those expenditures, to which Amazon and Google added in 2017, spiked after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. The three tech giants spent more than ten million dollars in the first three months of the Trump administration lobbying against efforts to scale back environmental regulations and in favor of relaxed immigration policies and “government funding of science” (the wording as it appeared on Google’s lobbying disclosure).44
Corporations and brands used to resist even vaguely political messaging. They assumed that endorsing any kind of political message would alienate someone, and losing even one potential client or consumer was bad for business. Not anymore. Consumers across the political spectrum now specifically seek out brands associated with an explicit social or political “stance.”45 In this way, they can appear to be engaging in civic and political culture without devoting any time to learning about civic or political culture.
Furthermore, the bread of most major American firms is no longer buttered at home. Writing in 2016 for the Los Angeles Times, Daniel Gross observed that coastal enterprises, particularly large firms, are less sensitive to their consumers than to the sensibilities of influencers and policy makers—especially when an ever-increasing share of sales is generated overseas. That’s why American business culture has become less sensitive to the U.S. electorate and more responsive to political elites and opinion-makers on the coasts and in Europe.46
These firms rarely respond to pressure from below and are all but impervious to boycotts. They are situated in elite liberal enclaves and are largely staffed with people who share the same political sensibilities. As a result, fewer and fewer C-suite executives see associating with social justice activism’s “call-out culture” as a threat to their bottom lines. Indeed, failing to adopt a socially responsible mission statement is a far greater risk than appearing neutral and maintaining a politically diverse clientele. That’s not courage or conviction. It’s just best practices.
Perhaps the impulse to go along with progressive crusades is why representatives from more than one hundred businesses packed into the East Room of the White House in April 2014 to sign Barack Obama’s “equal pay pledge.” Rooting out pervasive, unspoken prejudices in the workplace that result in the systematic oppression of women was this campaign’s ostensible purpose. In truth, however, it was an effort to mobilize a coalition of social justice advocates to vote Democratic in the upcoming midterm elections.
The pledge compelled businesses to acknowledge the existence of the alleged “national pay gap,” the ever-shifting chasm between what men and women make for the same work. Among other non-binding and symbolic measures, the pledge committed employers to review “personnel process to reduce unconscious bias and structural barriers.” If this sounds to you less like a policy initiative and more like politics, you are astute. Ahead of the 2014 midterms, Obama’s political operation pushed all their chips in on the “wage gap.”
“Oh, hi. I’m Sarah Silverman, writer, comedian, and vagina owner,” Ms. Silverman said in a pro-Obama radio spot that aired in 2014. “Women make up almost half the working population, yet we typically earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man makes in almost every profession.” Silverman also released a viral video alleging that being a woman costs approximately eleven thousand dollars per year in lost earnings. This amounts to approximately five hundred thousand dollars in lost wages for women. Silverman demurely called it the “vagina tax.”47 In his State of the Union address that year, the president himself made the same assertion, minus the references to female anatomy: “Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong. And in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”
“Did you know that women are still paid less than men,” the Obama White House’s website asked its credulous readers. “On average, full-time working women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.” Upon learning of this tremendous injustice, WhiteHouse.gov visitors were prompted to print out a selection of greeting cards featuring their favorite agitprop illustration. The White House’s example featured a happy man enjoying his whole dollar while a miserable looking woman is forced to make due with three quarters and two pennies. “The wage gap is not a myth,” the greeting card read.48
