If a Company Responds to Social Pressure, That’s Progress
In last week’s newsletter, I had a conversation with the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò about the nature of dissent in an era when almost every message, however revolutionary in origin, gets processed and then ultimately defanged through the practice of “elite capture.” We touched on the question of “real” change and how it’s easy to see Black Lives Matter signs in wealthy neighborhoods or watch “woke” commercials from nefarious, multinational corporations and conclude that everything is fake virtue signaling and that nobody is invested in “real” change.
This brings up a deeper question: What is “real” versus “not real” change? We can probably all agree, for example, that if Roe v.
Wade is overturned, it will represent “real” change in the reproductive health and rights of millions of people. But what about less concrete things like, say, equity measures in schools?
The dichotomy between “real” and “not real” can be found in an article by Adam Serwer last month in The Atlantictitled “The Amazon Union Exposes the Emptiness of ‘Woke Capital.’” The term “woke capital” is a bit amorphous, but it generally refers to attempts by corporate America and elite cultural institutions to gesture toward social justice movements without changing their stranglehold on resources.
