July 4th is a big deal in America. Folk don’t merely celebrate the day that thirteen former British colonies broke away from Britain back in 1776. Americans, I discovered when I moved here, spend July 4th reveling in being American. No matter when it was that you or your ancestors moved over here, July 4th is an occasion to rejoice that they did.
So, it is hard to overstate how offensive it was for Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream vendor, to mark the day with a tweet claiming that “the US exists on stolen Indigenous land”, which should be “returned”.
The tweet that Ben & Jerry’s sent on July 4th
What possessed Ben & Jerry’s, part of the global Unilever conglomerate, to say something quite so gratuitously offensive?
Ben & Jerry’s are not only guilty of bad history (Indigenous American tribes were busy “stealing” land from other indigenous Americans long before the Mayflower showed up). They are guilty of hypocrisy.
While attacking America for existing on “stolen land”, Ben & Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, sells ice cream to Putin’s Russia, a country that is actually engaged in stealing bits of Ukraine.
Unilever says it is still operating in Russia because “for companies like Unilever, which have a significant physical presence in the country, exiting is not straightforward” and because “were we to abandon our business and brands in the country, they would be appropriated – and then operated – by the Russian state”.
It’s not just Ben & Jerry’s. Earlier this year, Bud Light, one of America’s top beer brands, decided it was time to distance the brand from its “frat guy” customers and embrace transgender “inclusivity”. Before that, Disney, a leading family entertainment business, made a big deal of backing a radical stance on social issues.
As Vivek Ramaswamy, a potential future Vice President, has been energetically pointing out, many of America’s leading fund managers impose explicitly “woke” agendas on the businesses they invest in.
What we once called “political correctness” has long been evident on American university campuses. But until relatively recently, that’s where it stayed. Now these ideas are moving mainstream.
When a big corporation indulges in “woke” signaling, I used to assume that they knew what they are doing. When Bud Light decided to embrace transgenderism, I imagined it was all part of a cunning marketing plan by clever MBAs to sell more beer.
Perhaps when “woke” ideas take hold of an institution, it is really a sign that those running it are out of any other ideas and bereft of intelligent insights. Look at what happened with some of these “woke” corporations next.
Bud Light’s marketing campaign offended their core customer base, and sales fell by about a third. Disney’s share price fell significantly.
To be “woke” is to have a sense of moral superiority, since those that are “woke” regard themselves as having “woken up” to the unjust ways of the world. They believe that they have a heightened sense of social injustice that others lack. This can cause otherwise intelligent and highly educated people to make some remarkably stupid decisions.
If being “woke” is bad business, why does it keep happening? We are seeing the consequences of two decades of having “woke” HR departments across corporate America.
For years, big firms have been recruiting and promoting people on the basis of diversity and inclusion – or even their commitment to combating climate change. An organization that recruits and promotes people on the basis of anything other than competence at their actual job risks becoming incompetent. A lot of fairly mediocre people have been overpromoted to the point where their mediocrity is starting to stand out.
We are starting to see a long overdue correction: and it would be a good thing if Ben & Jerry’s took the same kind of hit that Bud Light did.
