On the streets, things are shifting as well. DC’s Mayor Bowser … had city street crews paint “Black Lives Matter” on 16^th Street leading up to the White House. Street signs now also proclaim “Black Lives Matter.”[3]

The president responds by building a wall–well, a fence really, around the White House—channeling his inner dictator, perhaps. It reminds me of when Pope Pius IX locked himself inside the Vatican in 1870 after the rest of Italy had unified. The popes stayed in the Vatican walls for the next sixty years in a self-imposed incarceration.  The allegory is not lost here, as people on the political left seem delighted that the President might do less damage if he stays behind his new wall, or even better, inside his bunker.

I have been wondering how long it would take before the corporations and advertisers start monetizing the BLM movement to sell goods and make profit. Americans define themselves and their citizenship by what they buy. During the Cold War, advertisers argued that you could insure your freedom through the purchase of cars, savings bonds, household appliances, and even baseball cards.[4] Now, we exhibit our political and personal identity by buying either an electric car or a coal roller for our pickup truck.

Nike was the first company to support the BLM movement explicitly when it signed Colin Kaepernick as a spokesperson in 2018. The National Football League blackballed him for taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem before football games. It was a small but brave protest against racial injustice and police brutality. “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” This is the slogan Nike gave him. With protests now happening on the streets of smaller cities and towns across America, more companies are realizing that there is profit to be made in BLM identity politics. Netflix, Twitter, Citigroup, Starbucks, HBO, and the Crimson Tide football team at the University of Alabama are all mobilizing the “Black Lives Matter” slogan to cultivate brand loyalty.[5] Even the NFL has apologized for its past intolerance. By in large, these companies do not have records of investing in poor neighborhoods, of affirmative action, or of sacrificing profits to promote civil rights. This is capitalist sloganeering. Whether it helps or dilutes the cause is debatable. On the one hand, these companies “mainstream” the BLM movement so that people like Kaepernick are no longer pariahs. They make it acceptable to support BLM. On the other hand, they provide a conduit for empty virtue signaling. This movement needs real, sustained sacrifice and action, not people who think that buying a Starbucks frapaccino absolves them of obligation so that they can go back to life-as-usual.

If the corporations really wanted to help, one thing they could do would be to address the internet access crisis. Millions of people don’t have access to internet, almost all of whom are the poor and in rural communities. In February of this year, the FCC reported that 23 million Americans didn’t have internet access. The company Broadband Now looked closer at the FCC’s research methodology and concluded that, in fact, the number is closer to 42 million.[6] That is about 13% of the population. Internet access is quickly becoming one of the ways that structural systems of power are reinforced in this country. Money and infrastructure would solve this problem. We have the money, but as with healthcare, we have to see it as something that everyone has a right to access. Pew Research shows that Black and Hispanic populations have significantly less access to internet at home and are markedly more smartphone dependent.[7] You can’t do school or work on a smartphone with a limited data plan and a lousy cellular signal. This would be a way to show that Black Lives Matter, that poor lives matter. It is an absurd idea, I know.[8]

Notes

[1] Julia Musto, “Trump Says He Went to White House Bunker for ‘Inspection,’ Hits Back at Criticism of Church Visit,” Fox News, June 3, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-bunker-inspection-church-tear-gas; David Moye, “Trump Brutally Mocked For Saying He Went To Bunker Just To Inspect It,” HuffPost, June 3, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-bunker-excuse-twitter-mock_n_5ed7c613c5b67887de3fa952.

[2] Pedro Querido, “From Kharms to Camus: Towards a Definition of the Absurd as Resistance,” The Modern Language Review 112, no. 4 (October 2017): 765–92.

[3] Alisa Gumbs, “Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Trolls Trump in the Blackest Way,” Black Enterprise, June 5, 2020, https://www.blackenterprise.com/washington-d-c-mayor-muriel-bowser-trolls-president-trump-in-the-blackest-way/.

[4] Margaret Peacock, “Cold War Consumption and the Marketing of Childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States, 1950-1960,” ed. Mark Tadajewski, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8, no. 1 (January 1, 2016): 83–98, https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-05-2015-0015.

[5] Mitchell Hartman, “Marketers Are Embracing Black Lives Matter,” Marketplace, June 2, 2020, https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/02/marketers-are-embracing-black-lives-matter/; Cedric Thornton, “NFL Commissioner: ‘We, The NFL Admit, We Were Wrong for Not Listening to NFL Players Earlier,’” Black Enterprise, June 6, 2020, https://www.blackenterprise.com/nfl-commissioner-we-the-nfl-admit-we-were-wrong-for-not-listening-to-nfl-players-earlier/.

[6] John Busby and Julia Tanberk, “FCC Underestimates Americans Unserved by Broadband Internet by 50%,” BroadbandNow, February 3, 2020, https://broadbandnow.com/research/fcc-underestimates-unserved-by-50-percent.

[7] Pew Research Center, “Demographics of Internet and Home Broadband Usage in the United States,” June 12, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/.

[8] Linda Poon, “There Are Far More Americans Without Broadband Access than Previously Thought,” Bloomberg.Com, February 19, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-19/where-the-u-s-underestimates-the-digital-divide.