04 Mar 2021 “Multiracial Whiteness” Gives The Game Away — Why Are Corporations Still Playing?

Just as the new administration was installed, the latest idea burst from the fetid corner of the academy whence so much modern evil springs: “multiracial whiteness.” The concept gives the game away. The woke project is not about race; it is about foisting a complex set of leftwing ideological positions and pathologies on American society. Wrapping it all up in race is a way of shutting up opponents; without the racial veneer, none of it could ever have escaped the faculty lounges and grievance-studies departments where it has festered for so long.

Scott Shepard

As this grows increasingly obvious, why on earth are corporations continuing to play merrily along?

Both parts of the “multiracial whiteness” configuration, in fact, are vital tells. The “multiracial” part arises to slap down the idea that all positions taken by non-whites deserve equal respect. Record-breaking numbers of black and Hispanic voters, especially men, voted against the woke ticket in 2020, and many of them actively support organizations that the left’s “America is a racist cesspit” narrative requires be treated as hate groups supporting white supremacy. So, gussied up in lots of purposively inscrutable academic jargon, the civil-conflict stirrers of the left trot out what amounts to nothing more than the old Uncle Tom trope: people who are not white but who disagree with their positions are really just trying to live in parasitical whiteness, in order to earn all that reflected glory.

This explanation instantly collapses, as society has changed so much from the dark past that the left perpetually pretends is still all around us that both rhetorical and genuine benefit accrues these days from being able to claim any racial, sexual or other “victim” status. There isn’t any reflected glory left.

But the notion of multiracial-whiteness blows up the claim that the movement is really about race. If it were, then all racial-“victim” voices would be equally respected. When they’re not – when it turns out that the ideology of the speaker regardless of color or background is paramount – then we know that the purpose is really to instantiate the favored ideology, not to advance racial equality, or equity, or justice, or whatever false descriptor is being applied on any given day. (Consider, for example, that hard-left Amazon made a Clarence Thomas biopic unavailable during Black History Month. This is not a movement about honest anti-racism.)

And one key goal of these ideologues is to stir up as much race hate and civic division in the country as possible. Consider the term “whiteness” itself. As the interview referenced above illustrates, proponents of “white supremacy theory” insist that they’re studying and attacking “whiteness,” not all white people. But they also insist, per theorists like Robin DiAngelo and others, that all white people are inherently and immutably racist, and participants in whiteness. So “whiteness” is a transparent dodge without a difference.

This fact was underscored last week when news broke that Coca-Cola, of all companies, had used training materials created by DiAngelo to instruct its employees to “try to be less white.” This was billed as fostering an “inclusive workplace.”

The materials did not, mind, instruct employees to “participate less in whiteness,” though even that would still be appalling. Nope. Just “try to be less white,” with being white described as doing all sorts of bad things which all people do to varying degrees throughout their life, wholly without regard to race, ethnicity, sex, sexual attraction or anything else. One in the long list of unattractive attributes that the training identified as uniquely white was arrogance. Anyone old enough to remember the Obama Administration will know whether arrogance is unique to white people.

This all reflects fairly horrifically on Coca-Cola. It is an Atlanta-based company and has been for more than a century. It should know what constitutes illegal and unconstitutional racism. And telling white employees to “try to be less white,” while also telling them that “white” means evil in all sorts of ways, is right in the deeply forbidden core. Contrary to what the modern race-baiters insist, being white is not the mark of Cain any more than being black is the mark of Ham. Purposefully telling employees that their race makes them inherently bad and then telling them to be less like their race, for the benefit of people of other races, is exquisitely unconstitutional. It’s a finely honed, beautifully sculpted monument to unconstitutionality. It’s breathtaking.

Meanwhile, when nailed for its violation, Coke didn’t promise instant reform, but instead, between the weasel words, indicated intentions to keep to its course.

One needn’t be a particularly insightful investor to draw important lessons about Coke’s management from this episode. There are ways to appease the baying mobs without metaphorically burning the Constitution on the roof of corporate headquarters. That the company would screw up so badly, on so public – and easily understood – an issue that they must have known would eventually draw press attention and public outrage, suggests that there must be other management problems there as well. Time to divest, I’d think, on instrumental grounds.

And time to divest, and to stop giving Coke your trade, on moral grounds as well. The left is certainly correct that we should have no truck with overt racism. It just obscures the fact that the quickest route to racism in the modern world is to follow its precepts.

Thing is, as was discussed in this space in the fall, Pepsi is similarly bad on similar grounds.

All in all: it’s teatime.

Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Deputy Director of its Free Enterprise Project. This was first published at Townhall Finance.