Why big business loves Black Lives Matter

There are many layers to this relationship. There is the immediate branding boost companies can gain from associating with BLM. According to an Edelman survey of 35 countries, 64 per cent of customers say they would reward firms for taking a stand on social issues. Brands like to win over consumers young so they can stay loyal for life – and many young people are uncritically supportive of BLM.

Woke politics has also been useful for firms hiding all kinds of unsavoury practices. Many firms will proclaim allegiance to BLM one day, while lobbying against curbs on forced labour the next, for instance. Indeed, whether you take the Marxist view, that all firms in a capitalist system exploit labour anyway, or the Adam Smith view, that sellers in a marketplace act out of self-interest rather than kindness, it is surely hard to take any company’s proclamations of righteousness too seriously.

But there is more to all this than cynicism and wokewashing. Many of the ideas about race being pushed by BLM – particularly the ubiquity of structural racism – are now part and parcel of corporate culture and the white-collar workplace. Race experts are invited to give workshops and training on diversity and inclusion. Employees are tested for their unconscious bias. An entire race industry worth billions has mushroomed. The most famous and sought-after race entrepreneurs, like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi, can earn vast sums of money in the corporate sector – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per hour. Those BLM protesters setting fire to police stations were not radical revolutionaries — they were more like the militant wing of the human-resources department.

Why has this happened? Clearly, these kinds of workshops are wasting precious work hours and don’t actually produce anything that can be sold. Perhaps what is most useful to the capitalists in these ‘anti-racist’ campaigns is their relentless attempts to re-racialise society. The Coca-Colas and the Nikes of the world are very keen on highlighting the racial differences between working people at every opportunity. According to leaked emails, insiders at Amazon-owned Whole Foods consider the ‘racial diversity’ of its workers in each branch an important metric in determining how likely they are to form unions.

Campaigns for ‘racial awareness’ seem almost perfectly designed to foreground apparent differences between their employees, to pit the ‘privileged’ against the ‘oppressed’ among the workforce, to downplay their common interests as workers. The potential for racism in the workplace – whether overt or in the form of microaggressions – has also given management much more authority to monitor workers’ interpersonal relationships, and even their private lives and political activities (particularly on social media). Race has always been relied on by elites to divide and manage people. But where they once drew on racist tropes, now they draw on ‘anti-racism’.