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The Rich are Falling in Love with Antiracism / Jennifer C. Pan

Social justice painting

 Something that I get at in my book is that companies will often use DEI as kind of an alternative to union organizing if they sense some dissatisfaction some complaints brewing within their workforces. Oftentimes they will call in union busters, who, by the way, many of them double As DEI consultants, and they'll try to find a way to say, for example, “Let's get an employee resource group working. So black workers and other workers of color can have a space where they can come and feel comfortable. Talk with other people who share their identity about their problems at work.” There's a very famous example from a few years ago. Right after the 2020 reckoning, the big outdoor recreation company, their employees wanted to unionize. And there's a very famous example where their chief diversity officer and the CEO kind of call everybody into the room to a captive audience meeting and preface the whole thing with a land acknowledgement and then tell their workers, well, we're a little bit concerned that if you unionize, that's going to hurt our efforts to diversify staff.

Jennifer C. Pan joins This Is Hell! to talk about her new book “Selling Social Justice: Why The Rich Love Antiracism” published by Verso Books.

Jennifer C. Pan is a writer in Los Angeles whose work has appeared in the Nation, the Atlantic, Dissent, Damage, and elsewhere. She was formerly a host of the Jacobin Show and a staff writer at the New Republic.

A new installment of “This Week In Rotten History” from Renaldo Migaldi follows the interview.

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Jencpan
Guest

Jennifer C. Pan

Jennifer C. Pan is a writer in Los Angeles whose work has appeared in the Nation, the Atlantic, Dissent, Damage, and elsewhere. She was formerly a host of the Jacobin Show and a staff writer at the New Republic.