#like such bad pr and yet!!! lewis has not done anything. why? cause he likes it!!! cause they've never moved on from the 1st moment they | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

leham-n-daavocado · 2 years

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From Still We Rise to We Stand Together

How Lewis could win his 8th WDC!

Six months ago, (wow that was like forever ago and yesterday) after the fallout of Silverstone, I wrote a post on the racialized content of Red Bull’s PR strategy and why that PR strategy would ultimately end up failing and motivating Lewis to win. I never ended up posting it because I thought...well, I don’t want to cause shit online. I really don’t. But if yesterday has shown anything about me, it’s that I just don’t give a shit at this point lol.

What my thesis boils down to is that Mercedes will not win this year because they’re faster. And today, we learned how true this is. The W12 is the W11 chassis with all the good bits stripped off and no development tokens taken to develop it further. Lewis will win because Red Bull has exposed how little they understand the POC/minority experience and create their own reckoning because of it.

Christian’s comments in the aftermath of Silverstone 2021, calling Lewis’ shunt of Max attempted murder, and the online upheaval really affected me. As a visible minority/ person of colour in Canada, Red Bull's post-race PR narrative about Lewis Hamilton was upsetting to say the least. Why? Because it brings up the hundreds of tiny indignities and larger pains you deal with every single day as a minority and don't normally think of or process until something like this triggers it. And you can't help but remember those bigger traumatic moments too.

That being said, my experiences with racism have been nowhere near as bad as Lewis where adults hurled racial slurs at him as a child or people used blackface to mock his family. But to say I've not experienced it at all would be false. It's in the way a teacher asks if you're supposed to be in ESL despite being born and raised in Canada because you got 70 on your first high school essay. Or being the only minority in the room and wondering if you can rely on the white people for your safety if something goes wrong. In the time since I first wrote this, a white man said “Fuck you, Chinese lady!” to my face in a grocery store.

I was shocked.

I’d lived in Canada most of my life. I was born here. Up until that point, no one had ever shown maliciousness towards my racial heritage. A lack of sensitivity? Yes. But never outright hostility. It was a sign of the times. Covid. And I was truly disappointed.

I was just standing by the grapes and I felt like crying. But I remember in all that shock, pain and realization that I had just become a victim of Anti-Asian hate, I felt angry.

No. You don’t get to dictate where I go. You don’t get to dictate how I feel. You don’t get to dictate how I will act after this.

And I am not fucking crying in a grocery store because of you.

I’m going to make the world better because you chose to be hateful.

And that’s Lewis Hamilton, but Red Bull has absolutely no idea about what it is to be Lewis and to survive, thrive and succeed in a world that wants none of that for you.

And yet, what has Red Bull done?

They've created a cross platform PR narrative painting Max as a victim of Lewis on highly racialized lines. It's in the way we hear about Helmut lobbying for a race ban and suspension for Lewis because he's dangerous. It's in the way Christian went on a media blitz accusing Lewis of nearly murdering Max and committing a crime. It's in the Red Bull associated Instagram accounts saying Lewis has no sportsmanship and shouldn't have celebrated his win and labelling the race a clownshow.

They said that the language got personal, but it's more than that.

All these words, phrases and chatter, (murderer, criminal, no class/decorum) is dog whistling meant to demean, discredit and harm black people. It's a wink and a nudge for those who harbour racist thoughts to feel validated and justified in their ideas and to enact harm on black people and other minorities. It is literally racist adjacent language that goes under the radar but has real, and exceeding terrible consequences.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Red Bull's PR strategy is literally inciting racial violence against Lewis Hamilton. Let's face it. Racism is nefarious and insidious. We've all been assimilated to it and many of the acts and behaviours we do are unconscious. So Red Bull's shitty PR narrative could be a larger symptom of unrecognized and unacknowledged systematic racism. After all, this is the team that did not take part in the Hamilton Commission. It shows they don't value the apolitical goal of the eradication of racism over racing. However, if their racist behaviour is intentional...like holy shit Batman, my standards are low, but you're literally limbo dancing with the Devil in Hell.

Dog whistling is something that has real consequences for minorities and people of colour. Why do you think so many Asian people have been murdered recently? It can't have anything to do with the incendiary and racialized language used against Asians by people in power about the Coronavirus. What Red Bull is saying is that it's okay to dip their toe in racism as long as they don't jump into the pool. It's okay to call Lewis a potential murderer as long as we don't actively tell people to abuse him, use blackface to mock him or yell racial slurs at him.

Using racism or racism adjacent language as a championship winning strategy is unequivocally wrong. Can Red Bull handle the potential blood on their hands if something happens as a consequence of their actions? And the whole argument that some people feel that accusations of racism are used to somehow prevent legitimate criticism of Lewis Hamilton just obfuscates dog whistling. It shows just how entrenched and deep the roots of racism are that we can't recognize its branches.

Nevertheless, this strategy will ultimately be ineffective and ultimately Red Bull's downfall.

Why?

They want to destabilize Lewis and make him feel like he doesn't belong in F1 and has no place in it! They want to make him jump through extra hoops. They want to make life difficult for him! They're gonna show him!

Newsflash. I can say with nearly 100% certainty Lewis already knows he doesn't belong. He already doesn't feel like he has a place in F1. He already jumps through extra hoops. Life is already difficult for him.

He's the only black driver in the history of F1. Less than one percent of everyone in F1 is black. He lives in a white dominant society that has suppressed and disadvantaged black people for hundreds of years.

You can't hurt someone with something they already know and acknowledge.

And still do you know who Sir Lewis Fucking Hamilton is?

He's the boy who destroyed the karting track despite adults hurling racial slurs at him. He's the man who nearly won a championship his first year and later on won a championship his second year despite "fans" mocking him and his family with blackface. He's won seven world championship titles in the face of being constantly discredited simply because of his skin colour. He's the man who time and time again had to carve a space for himself.

And you think he can't do it again?

Does this sound like a person who can be cowed by tactics like this?

What Red Bull doesn't understand is that as a minority, the only choice you often have is to succeed. They don't know what it's like to feel the sheer disappointment at a society that hurts you so much, but still go out to live in it and have love for it.

Excellence is not a choice. It’s a necessity. Success can be all the resistance you have. Not succeeding is not an option. You have to choose the responsibility to succeed and be the one to do it. You can choose to be an individual and not a token, but to do so means the death of your dreams. If you don't succeed, you won't be heard, you won't be seen, and you won't get what you need. And if you don't take the responsibility to succeed, it will make it worse for others like you.

But here’s what you have to know about Sir Lewis Fucking Hamilton:

He sees those who are oppressed and he not only sees them, he takes them with him. He’s not only the guy who is going to be the hero and example to others that things are possible, he’s going to allow you to stand with him.

That’s what We Stand Together is about. He’s not just racing for himself. He’s racing for everyone. He takes the responsibility of holding everyone else up because he’s strong enough and he can. Your circumstance may not allow you to fight, but his does, and he will. It’s why we want to see him win so bad. Why a victory in Brazil feels the way it does.

Consequently, Red Bull’s media tactics just feeds the beast in Lewis Hamilton that will destroy them. As he mentioned on Season 3 of Drive to Survive, his experiences of racism created a monster that won seven championships. And none of this is fair or justifies the way Lewis has been treated, but if you want to look for direct links to Lewis’ performance, it’s always in the way he has no other choice but to succeed because someone didn’t want him there. He needed to create the space. He needed to overcome. He needed to be excellent. So he did.

This is the guy Red Bull is racing against.

So Red Bull might want to be prepared to get rekt.

#f1 #lewis hamilton #sir lewis hamilton #mercedes #Red Bull

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dailytomlinson · 4 years

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Louis Tomlinson - WIRED

How to pronounce Louis Tomlinson name? Well I just did that for you. Before, well before i was on the XF, all me friends from back home called me Lewis - I mean my name is Loui-e but they called me Lewis, that's what I was known as, back home. Then on me first audition Simon called me Louie, and I wasn't about to correct him, you know what I mean?

How old is Louis Tomlinson? I'm getting older, feels like i'm getting older. I'm 27, I am.

How is Louis Tomlinson? Yeah, I'm doing all right, fanks, I'm doing alright, that's a random google one. What does google say in response to that, I'd love to know.

How do I meet Louis Tomlinson? Come to tour, come to tour, and I'll meet you there, hopefully.

What's Louis Tomlinson favorite food?

I eat a lot of rubbish food, probably burgers. I eat a lot of McDonald’s, but in terms of the ultimate burger, it probably has to be In'N'Out. That is a proper burger.

What's Louis Tomlinson Zodiac Sign? There's a lot of talk of this while I've been doing promo in America, you guys love the zodiac stuff. Capricorn, I am. I was told recently about some of the characteristics of the Capricorn, think I may have like two of eight. What's Louis Tomlinson phone number? That is a question I won't be answering. Me number's got out quite a few times. and I like me own privacy, so unfortunately I'm not gonna give you that.

What kind of dogs does Louis Tomlinson have? I’ve got two. I’ve got a golden doodle and a labradoodle. Bruce and Cliff. They’re quite different dogs, the two of them. Bruce is like proper well behaved, good lad, proper like a pretty dog, you know what i mean? And cliff, he’s big he’s clumsy, he’s a thief cause you know everyone says dogs shouldn’t go anywhere near chocolate and i think maybe two or three easters ago he stole a full easter egg, a full easter egg, which I was worried about but i found out after that as long as they don’t eat their bodyweight in chocolate, you’re alright, so he lives to fight another day. Is Louis Tomlinson British? Too right, good to know.

Is Louis Tomlinson on tour? Not yet, glad you asked. About to go on the road next year. Tickets are on sale, go have a look.

Is Louis Tomlinson a football player? Yeah, me local club Donny Rovers, where I’m from I was lucky enough one year, I mean it was a bit of a PR thing on there but also I’m fairly decent football player, they signed me onto the box for a year, I was in the back of the program every game day, I got a squad number which i've got tattooed on me hand, 28, it was a good time to be around.

Is Louis Tomlinson Vegan? I’m not a Vegan, I mean, in England we’re doing all sorts at the moment, like vegan sausage rolls, which feels like a contraction to me, but I’m not a vegan, no, but respect to everyone who is.

What is Louis Tomlinsons favourite color? Red, I love red. Often try to incorporate that into pretty much anything I do really, creatively and also me football club, Donny Rovers, they play in red so that would be why.

What is Louis Tomlinson Just Hold On about? You know it's another one of those songs that's saying you know regardless what happens in life you just gotta try and be hopeful, really.

What Is Louis Tomlinsons middle name ? That'll be an obvious google answer, it's William. Don't use it that often, I imagine some of me fans know that that's me middle name, bit of trivia for you.

What movies has Louis Tomlinson been in? I haven't been in a movie other than that One Direction movie, starred in that. When I was really young I did the odd bit of extra work here and there, there's one really tragic clip online of me I think about 14 years old, I don't have a line but I look petrified.

Who is Louis Tomlinson best’s friend? Probably me ginger mate, Ollie, goes everywhere with me, lives with me most of the time, hears the songs first, most of the time. Went to school with me, I’ve known him for 10, 12 years now? Wow

Who is Louis Tomlinson X-Factor Judge I was an XF judge, also been on the show as a contestant. I was in this band called, One Direction, they were pretty big.

Who’s Louis Tomlinson Miss You About? Miss You was originally written, I was bouncing between different parties, all the night life LA has to offer, and there was moment where I felt like I was going along with enjoying it so much, and that’s kinda what that song is about

Who did Louis Tomlinson play for? Me Donny Rovers, but if we’re going far back, me sunday league team and local area was the first team that I joined, called Tickhill Juniors [FC], I think they’re still going. In fact, I got a mildly cheeky e-mail from them pretty recently asking for some funding. So, I’ll be in touch. Where was Louis Tomlinson born? I was born in Doncaster, probably best place in the world. If you haven’t been, you should go. Great holidays, absolutely love where I come from, great people where I come from, great night out as well.

Where does Louis Tomlinson currently live? I live between LA and London, and also try to get to Doncaster as much as I can. Quite a adjust jump. It’s forever hot here in LA, we’re about to get to November, and I’m red dot, and I’m just a true Brit, you know? When it’s Winter, I want cold. Where is Louis Tomlinson right now? Here, doing this little piece of camera for you!

Where did Louis Tomlinson go to school? In Doncaster there was a school called Hayfield School, went there 90% of me school life. Now I failed my A-Levels and didn’t have me back in, which was a bit unfair of them, so then I went to another school for a year and then I’m at the X-Factor.

Where did Louis Tomlinson audition? I auditioned in Manchester, when did the X-Factor. Basically, long story short, the judges see thousands of people, you know, across have many days. So I wanted to be the star of the auditions, so I started queuing up at like 4am because I wanted to be one of the first to be seen, figure I’d have a better chance then and I was right.

When was Louis Tomlinson born? Christmas Eve, 1991. Good times to have birthdays, everyone’s in a good mood.

When is Louis Tomlinson going on tour? My tour starts March next year and goes all the way to June? July? Super excited to be going on tour, feel like I’ve been waiting all me solo career for that moment. So pretty excited about that one.

When Louis Tomlinson Valerie? I’m imagining you talking about when I started with the band and got on our first tour and did a cover of Amy Winehouse’s Valerie, maybe you’re asking when I’m singing that again and the answer is I don’t know.

When did Louis Tomlinson perform JHO? I performed it a few times, it comes out off the top of me head 2017. My first performance was at the XF and I hadn’t done a solo performance on me own and the XF was always a big performance for us as a band so was good to be back and do that on my own was both exciting and nerve-wrecking.

Louis Tomlinson CUTE I’m not making this, Im sure I can read it. Louis Tomlinson Cute, I don’t know how to react to this one other than say ‘Thanks, love’

Louis Tomlinson Tattoos That I have many of, quite a few stupid ones. Trying to look which of me latest was, probably this horrible one [Robbie’s X on his right arm] I got at the XF. Not even straight lines, pretty bad.

Louis Tomlinson eye color I got blue eyes, not gonna lie. Me eyes do change color, when I wear a blue top it looks bluer. Planned well today, but normally, blue

Louis Tomlinson hairstyles Ain’t had that many of them to be honest. I’ve had three in rotation for the past nine years. What’s pretty funny about me hair though, from being in a band like One Direction, I’ve almost forgot how to do my own hair. It’s pretty tragic, innit? I’m lucky to have someone to do me hair, but there’s times where I got a night out and I’m looking at me hair and thinking ‘I don’t even know where to start?’ so I just put a cap on

Louis Tomlinson One Direction That’s the band I’m in, was in, whichever way you look at it at, don’t really know what else to say about that good time in me life. Hopefully we come back.

Louis Tomlinson Back To You Yeah, that’s the name of one of me songs. So I assume you bang that into google and my song will just pop straight up. Give it a listen if you want, did it Bebe Rexha, did the music video in Doncaster, where I’m from, so again, that’s special for me.

#wired #louis tomlinson #061119 #quote #wmi #transcript

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random-notes-and-jottings · 4 years

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How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture

Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.

The delete button over a tumbrel

Story by Helen Lewis

JULY 14, 2020

GLOBAL

Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent. Commentators warn of “mob justice,” while activists exult in their newfound power to change the world.

Both groups are right, and wrong. Because the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture,” is not through a social lens, but an economic one.

Take the fall of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, which seems inevitable in hindsight—everyone knew he was a sex pest! There were even jokes about it on 30 Rock! But it took The New York Times months of reporting to ready its first story for publishing; the newspaper was taking on someone with deep pockets and a history of intimidating critics into silence. Then the story went off like a hand grenade. Suddenly, the mood—and the economic incentives—shifted. People who had been afraid of Weinstein were instead afraid of being taken down alongside him.

The removal of Weinstein from his company, and his subsequent conviction for rape, is a good outcome. But the mechanism it revealed is more morally ambiguous: The court of public opinion was the only forum left after workplace protections and the judicial system had failed. The writer Jon Schwarz once described the “iron law of institutions,” under which people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool.

But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival. (I’m not using the word woke here in a sneering, pejorative sense, but to highlight that the original definition of wokeness is incompatible with capitalism. Also, I’m not taking credit for the coinage: The writer Ross Douthat got there first.) In fact, let’s go further: Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the random firings of individuals, some of whose infractions are minor, and some of whom are entirely innocent of any bad behavior. In the first group goes the graphic designer Sue Schafer, outed by The Washington Post for attending a party in ironic blackface—a tone-deaf attempt to mock Megyn Kelly for not seeing what was wrong with blackface. Schafer, a private individual, was confronted at the party over the costume, went home in tears, and apologized to the hosts the next day. When the Post ran a story naming her, she was fired. New York magazine found numerous Post reporters unwilling to defend the decision to run the story—and plenty of unease that the article seemed more interested in exonerating the Post than fighting racism. Even less understandable is the case of Niel Golightly, communications chief at the aircraft company Boeing, who stepped down over a 33-year-old article arguing that women should not serve in the military. When Barack Obama, a notably progressive president, only changed his mind on gay marriage in the 2010s, how many Americans’ views from 1987 would hold up to scrutiny by today’s standards? This mechanism is not, as it is sometimes presented, a long-overdue settling of scores by underrepresented voices. It is a reflexive jerk of the knee by the powerful; a demonstration of institutions’ unwillingness to tolerate any controversy, whether those complaining are liberal or conservative. Another case where the punishment does not fit the offense is that of the police detective Florissa Fuentes, who reposted a picture from her niece taken at a Black Lives Matter protest. One of those pictured held a sign reading who do we call when the murderer wear the badge. Another sign, according to the Times, “implied that people should shoot back at the police.” Fuentes, a 30-year-old single mother to three children, deleted the post and apologized, but was fired nonetheless.

In the second group, the blameless, lies Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “okay” symbol by a driver he cut off at a traffic light. The inevitable viral video claimed that this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired. Cafferty is a working-class man in his 40s from San Diego. The loss of his job hit him hard enough that he saw a counselor. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told my colleague Yascha Mounk. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.”

The phrase is haunting—not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes. Nor is the fact that your comments lie decades in the past, or that they have been misinterpreted by bad-faith actors, or that you didn’t make them. The ground—your life—is scorched just the same.

It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets. We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease. But we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established. Afraid of the reputational damage that can be incurred in minutes, companies are behaving in ways that range from thoughtless and uncaring to sadistic. For Cafferty’s employer, what’s one random truck driver versus the PR bump of being able to cut off a bad news cycle by saying you’ve fired your “white-supremacist employee”?

Let’s look at another example of how woke capitalism operates. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and the protests that followed, White Fragility, a 2018 book by Robin DiAngelo, returned to the top of The New York Times’s paperback-nonfiction chart. The author is white, and her book is for white people, encouraging them to think about what it’s like to be white. So the American book-buying public’s single biggest response to the Black Lives Matter movement was … to buy a book about whiteness written by a white person.

This is worse than mere navel-gazing; it’s synthetic activism. It risks making readers feel full of piety and righteousness without having actually done anything. Buying a book on white fragility improves the lives of the most marginalized far less than, say, donating to a voting-rights charity or volunteering at a food bank. It’s pure hobbyism.

Why is DiAngelo’s book so popular? Again, look at economics. White Fragility is a staple of formal diversity training, in universities from London to Iowa, and at publications including Britain’s right-wing Telegraph newspaper, as well as The Atlantic. The client list on DiAngelo’s website includes giant corporations such as Amazon and Unilever; nonprofits such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hollywood Writers Guild, and the YMCA; as well as institutions and governmental bodies such as Seattle Public Schools, the City of Oakland, and the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis.

In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.” Part of the problem is that although those delivering them are undoubtedly well-meaning, the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications. “Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.” Yet metrics-obsessed companies love these forms of training. When the British Labour leader, Keir Starmer, caused offense by referring to Black Lives Matter as a “moment” rather than a movement, he announced that he would undergo implicit-bias training. It is an approach that sees bias as a moral flaw among individuals, rather than a product of systems. It encourages personal repentance, rather than institutional reform. Bohnet suggested other methods to increase diversity, such as removing ages and photographs from job applications, and reviewing the language used for advertisements. (Men are more likely to see themselves as “assertive,” she argued.) Here is another option for big companies: Put your money into paying all junior staff enough for them to live in the big city where the company is based, without needing help from their parents. That would increase the company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay raise.

This, however, would break the iron law of woke capitalism—better to have something you can point to and say “Aren’t we progressive?” than to think about the real problem. Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.

If this is a moment for power structures to be challenged, and old orthodoxies to be overturned, then understanding the difference between economic radicalism and social radicalism is vital. These could also be described as the difference between identity and class. That is not to dismiss the former: Many groups face discrimination on both measures. Women might not be hired because “Math isn’t for girls” or because an employer doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave. An employer may not see the worth of a minority applicant, because they don’t speak the way the interviewer expects, or that applicant might be a second-generation immigrant whose parents can’t subsidize them through several years of earning less than a living wage.

All this I’ve learned from feminism, where the contrast between economic and social radicalism is very apparent. Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female or minority CEO for the first time is socially radical. Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing social-housing tenants with homes not covered in flammable cladding is economically radical. Changing the name of a building at a university is socially radical; improving on its 5 percent enrollment rate for Black students—perhaps by smashing up the crazy system of legacy admissions—would be economically radical.

In my book Difficult Women, I wrote that the only question I want to ask big companies who claim to be “empowering the female leaders of the future” is this one: Do you have on-site child care? You can have all the summits and power breakfasts that you want, but unless you address the real problems holding working parents back, then it’s all window dressing.

Along with anti-racism and anti-sexism efforts, LGBTQ politics suffers a similar confusion between economic and social radicalism. The arrival of Pride month brings the annual argument about how it should be a “protest, not a parade.” The violence and victimization of the Stonewall-riot era risk being forgotten in today’s “branded holiday,” where big banks and clothing manufacturers fly the rainbow flag to boost their corporate image. In Britain and the U.S., these corporate sponsors want a depoliticized party—a generic celebration of love and acceptance—without tough questions about their views on particular domestic laws and policies, or their involvement in countries with poor records on LGBTQ rights. Some activists in Britain have tried to get Pride marches to stop allowing the arms company BAE to be a sponsor, given its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, an explicitly homophobic and sexist state. When Amazon sponsored last year’s PinkNews Awards, the former Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T. Davies used his lifetime-achievement-award acceptance speech to tell the retailer to “pay your fucking taxes.” That’s economic radicalism.

Activists regularly challenge criticisms of “cancel culture” by saying: “Come on, we’re just some people with Twitter accounts, up against governments and corporate behemoths.” But when you look at the economic incentives, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back. Companies caught in the scorching light of a social-media outcry are ike politicians caught lying or cheating, who promise a “judge-led inquiry”: They want to do something, anything, to appear as if they are taking the problem seriously—until the spotlight moves on.

Some defenestrations are brilliant, and long overdue. Weinstein’s removal from a position of power was undoubtedly a good thing. But the firing of Emmanuel Cafferty was not. For activists, the danger lies in the cheap sugar rush of tokenistic cancellations. Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.

If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is. When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.

Remember the iron law of woke institutions: For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive … and no economic radicalism at all. The latter is where activists need to apply their pressure.

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