Woke-ism in Corporate America

March 1, 2022 by Ananya Gill Sanha

By Ananya Gill Sanha*

Woke-ism in Corporate America

 

With the conference of “personhood” to corporations,[1] the twenty-first century corporation must embrace the shareholder, “demos prudence” theory[2]: corporations should consider all their stakeholders involved and be provided with a legal basis for social commentary. But does the authentic message of social commentary, provided there is one, get lost in cyberspace translation? 

The corporation’s “critical role in legal ordering”[3] does not account for the emotional labor and exploitation borne by its employees. Through metaphors of revolution and “woke-ness,” social media giants and other companies capitalize on black culture, pain, and disenfranchisement.[4] According to Benjamin, blackness is viewed both as unattainably ‘cool’ and “conflated with cultural deficiency”; white corporate brands use blackness to emulate wokeness.[5]

In doing so online, corporations form a heterotopia. Heterotopias, distinct from utopia, encapsulate those spaces of “otherness” that both mirror the world outside and ‘upset’ typical power dynamics.[6] The spectacularizing of blackness, which both objectifies and dehumanizes the group of people, is then also translated into corporate white comfort through racially ambiguous voicing, bleaching black bodies, forging racially tinged intertextual connections.[7] Think computer-generated images of black influencers used by brands, such as clothing store Balmain.[8]  

At the same time of these developments using social media, particularly Instagram, workers at Adidas, Everlane, Glossier, and others have “called out” their companies’ performative allyship.[9]

Cyberspace impacts the racial and class power relations performed in real life,“IRL”[10]; cyberspace is a site of contestation with roots in idealized notions of utopia that impact embodied relationships. These relational dynamics inform the socialized lenses in both cyberspace and real space.[11]

The panacea of spectacularizing blackness at first seems to be manifesting woke culture on the internet. First arising in black communities as a watchword against police brutality and then transforming into a signal of social awareness, “staying woke” has functioned at several points as an indicator of resistance.[12]

The insider/whistle-blower aspect of such collective action coupled with the threat of cancel culture undermines the inauthentic virtue signaling performed by self-interested companies online.[13]

  Two things occur simultaneously with woke-washing corporate culture: 1) the spectacularizing of blackness, and 2) the transformation of black resistance into exploitative labor online. Through corporate woke-washing, capitalist structures transformed “staying woke,” originally a form of resistance into exploitable labor. Exploitation in these scenarios do not simply evoke the Marxist notion of surplus product or the capital-labor relation,[14] but something deeper. It involves the transformation of resistance into labor, thus flattening the authenticity and efficacy of social media resistance against systems of oppression while simultaneously appropriating resistance for capitalistic ends. The transformation of black resistance on social media to a tool of capitalism produces racial battle fatigue[15] and contributes to the history of white-imperial exploitation of black bodies, property, and intellectual property. 

But the baseline motif remains, there is “No ethical consumption under capitalism.”[16]

 

[*] Staff Editor, Geo. J. L. & Mod. Crit. Race Persp.; J.D. Candidate, Georgetown University Law Center (L’2023), © 2022, Ananya Gill Sinha.

[1] Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). 

[2] Jennifer Fan, Woke Capital: The Role of Corporations in Social Movements, 9 Harv. Bus. L. Rev. 441 (2019). 

[3] Id.

[4] Joe Berkowitz, This former tech CEO takes down woke capitalism but misses the point on wokeness, Fast Company (Aug. 25, 2021), https://www.fastcompany.com/90668264/vivek-ramaswamy-woke-inc-roivant-takes-down-woke-capitalism-misses-point-wokeness.

[5] Francesca Sobande, Spectacularized and Branded Digital (Re)presentations of Black People and Blackness, Television & New Media, Jan. 22, 2021, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1527476420983745.

[6] Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, Architecture/Movement/Continuite, Oct. 1984, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf.

[7] Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Jessica Harris, Stephanie Zamora, Producing white comfort through “coroporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media and @BrandsSayingBae, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Sept. 11, 2020, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ijsl-2020-2105/html.

[8] Francesca Sobande, CGI influencers are here. Who’s profiting from them should give you pause. Fast Company (Oct. 5, 2021) https://www.fastcompany.com/90682915/cgi-influencers-are-here-whos-profiting-from-them-should-give-you-pause.

[9] Jennifer Liu, Glossier and the rise of workers using social media to hold employers accountable, CNBC (Oct. 14, 2020) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/14/workers-are-turning-to-social-media-to-hold-employers-accountable.html

[10] Colin A Beckles, Black Liberation and the Internet: A Strategic Analysis, 31:3 J. Black Studies 311 (Jan. 2001), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2668035?seq=10#metadata_info_tab_contents.  

[11] Julie E. Cohen, Cyberspace As/And Space, 107 Colum. L. Rev. 210 (2007). 

[12] Aja Romano, A History of “wokeness,” Vox (Oct. 9, 2020), https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy.

[13] Helen Lewis, How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture, The Atlantic (July 14, 2020), https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086/.

[14] Donald J. Harris, Capitalist Exploitation and Black Labor: Some Conceptual Issues (Jan. 1, 1978),  https://web.stanford.edu/~dharris/papers/Capitalist%20exploitation%20and%20black%20labor%20-%20some%20conceptual%20issues.pdf.

[15] Apryl A. Williams, Zaida Bryant, Christopher Carvell, Uncompensated emotional labor, racial battle fatigue, and (in)civility in digital spaces, Sociology Compass (Dec. 10, 2018), https://criticalracedigitalstudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Emotional_Labor_Williams.pdf.

[16] Joe Berkowitz, This former tech CEO takes down woke capitalism but misses the point on wokeness, Fast Company (Aug. 25, 2021), https://www.fastcompany.com/90668264/vivek-ramaswamy-woke-inc-roivant-takes-down-woke-capitalism-misses-point-wokeness.