Outreach

In the drugstore today was a Limited Edition jar of Vaseline "healing jelly." What, exactly, it is supposed to heal, I don't know. It stood out to me because it had a number of stylized representations of faces on it. It looked as if it were doing some sort of recognition of Black women. And the label read "equitable skincare for all." It caught my attention because I'd seen some complaints about it online. Nothing to rival the teapot tempest that sprung up around Walmart's Juneteenth ice cream, but feathers did appear to have been ruffled.

Personally, nether the "Celebration Edition: Juneteenth Ice Cream" nor the Vaseline Limited Edition bother me. Okay, corporations are looking to show that they're paying attention to the Black community and hoping that this will translate into some combination of sales and ongoing goodwill. This is what corporations do. It should be about as surprising as water making things wet. And their flat and impersonal overtures are also just how corporations do things. The pushback against these things tends to be framed as if it were a personal affront; and the sort of things that corporations would have realized would have been poorly received if they'd been paying attention.

But the Black community in the United States is just that; a community. That's different from a hive mind. Had Unilever asked me if the Vaseline Limited Edition were a good idea, I likely would have shrugged and told them that I didn't have a problem with it. It's not really my thing, but there's nothing wrong with it. I don't have a sense that corporations ought to interact with me with an eye towards making me feel respected and valued. But I also understand that, despite the fact that corporations are always interested primarily in their bottom line, that as clumsy as things like this are, someone meant well. So I'm willing to recognize that for what it is. I understand the things that people, especially activists, want from corporations: more intentional hiring from, and directed investment in, minority communities. And that's fair. Putting out new themed products doesn't satisfy that. But I've also worked in corporate America long enough to understand doing things for communities can be more difficult than people think it is, when those things have to be done in accordance with existing corporate practices and rules. (My recent work on a corporate responsibility project was an education unto itself.)

Of course, I don't really need anything from corporate America in a community sense. I don't live in an area that's suffering from deindustrialization, blighted by crime or impoverished due to high unemployment. I can see these supposed missteps as well-meaning, but ultimately hollow, gestures. I don't need the energy and resources that have gone into their creation to have been put to "better use." And I'm not sure that relying on corporations to wade into social problems is a useful strategy anyway. To the degree that the broader Black community has problems that need solutions, I suspect that the long and grinding process of finding internal solutions will be more fruitful in the end.