By Rann Miller
Earlier this month the New York Times paid homage to Jay-Z and his brand of corporate activism via Roc Nation—his record and management company. The NFL owners sought to answer how to procure Black entertainment to further its goal of profiting from Black bodies in light of its stance on Colin Kaepernick, and Jay-Z provided the owners with an answer.
Roc Nation views itself as a social justice organization who believes that wealth creation, not protest, is the means for creating social change. According to Jay-Z, wealth can facilitate philanthropic initiatives as well as opportunities to sit at tables with power. His wealth creation has enabled him to assist financially in causes like the Reform Alliance and negotiate with the NFL commissioner.
Jay-Z considers this to be real social justice; a sort that replaces protests that disrupts traffic with a phone call that assumes matters of justice to be best administered by those in power—often times those who may be the root of the injustice in the first place.
Black History Month is a time where we often celebrate American champions who fought vigorously against anti-Blackness, like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and Fannie Lou Hamer. We not only celebrate them for their ideals, but we celebrate them for their actions. However, the action of our heroes of the Civil Rights movement was protesting on the streets, not corporate sponsorships.
When questioned previously about Colin Kaepernick’s protest, Jay-Z infamously said “I think we past kneeling. I think it’s time to go into actionable items.” We now know what those actionable items are: merchandise sales, concerts, commercials and philanthropy as part of the NFL’s Inspire Change initiative; and by extension the Players Coalition. However, those “actionable items,” have not prevented anti-Blackness. Deandre Arnold was still told he cannot walk in his graduation because of his locks. Neither have those actionable items prevented police killings. 235 Black people were still killed by police in 2019.
The Botham Jean commercial will not prevent Black people from getting killed by the police. What it did do was misrepresent the problem. The situation Colin Kaepernick and other protestors are calling attention to is the killing of Black people i.e. Walter Scott, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, by uniformed police officers without consequence.
What Colin Kaepernick intended with his protest and continues through his work is to shed further light on the point that racist policies and racist ideas are the reason behind Black people getting killed by the state and that in order to address it, you must confront racism head on with the goal of becoming anti-racist. This involves making white people uncomfortable.
What the Botham Jean commercial does on the surface is tell the story of an honorable young man who was killed. Beneath the surface, the commercial intentionally fails to mention the issue Kaepernick raised that led to the creation of the commercial in the first place. There is no mention of police brutality; no mention of racist policies such as racial profiling that lead to pretext stops. No mention of how Eric Garner, Philando Castile or Terence Crutcher were killed. The commercial was safe; it didn’t offend white people and it didn’t offend police.
In West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado and Arizona, teachers protested for higher wages and better resources by going on strike; which all resulted in a win. Young people marching in the streets for stronger gun laws saw several states strengthen their gun laws. In Puerto Rico, the people marched in the streets in mass to remove a corrupt governor and he resigned. In communist China, the legislature removed an extradition bill due to mass protests in the streets of Hong Kong.
Protests work.
Sitting down with the racist regimes of the old Confederate States didn’t change how those states treated Black people. Applying pressure to those racist regimes via protests where children were jailed, teenagers were hit with water hoses and bit by dogs—did. Protests aren’t a relic of the past.
Colin Kaepernick’s protest is what enabled Jay-Z to make a business deal with the NFL; one where he could profit while “inspiring change.” But where Jay-Z and his corporate activism misses the mark is in its belief that one can eradicate anti-Blackness through corporate boardrooms. Corporate activism allows folks like Jay-Z and NFL players (who may genuinely wish to help Black people) who have something to lose by angering white people to “help” Black people in ways that aren’t a danger to their present and future economic opportunities.
However, Harry Belafonte reminded us of the words of Paul Robeson, that artists are the gatekeepers of truth. Mr. Belafonte also warned us about Jay-Z, saying that he turned his back on social responsibility, to which Jay-Z responded that his presence was charity.
Corporate activism is philanthropy and philanthropists are seen as humanitarians, not activists. Humanitarians (and God bless them) focus on those in need. That doesn’t scare off corporate sponsors. Activists focus on the policies that create the conditions by which people are in need. Activists are disruptors that point the finger at corporations and politicians who engage in anti-Blackness for profit. Jay-Z isn’t pointing any fingers.
Why would he? He’s a billionaire. Billionaires aren’t so because they jeopardize their gains on behalf of the people. There are no riches in activism. There are no riches in protesting… unless you decide to commodify protests, but I digress.
The danger in celebrating corporate activism, and elevating Jay-Z as a model of activism, is that it frames resistance and rebellion as something to be done with oppressors rather than something to be done with the people. Jay-Z’s framing says that we need community relations between the people and police when in reality, we simply need for police to stop shooting Black people.
Jay-Z says we need to work within the power structure by using their tools to address injustice. The people, however, haven’t had the luxury of using tools of their oppression to remove said oppression. The tool of the people is disruption. Jay-Z’s brand of social justice begs the question, “Who exactly is he fighting for?”
Suggested Readings:
Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete, William C. Rhoden (2007)
The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America & The Politics of Patriotism, Howard Bryant (2019)
Full Dissidence: Notes From an Uneven Playing Field, Howard Bryant (2020)
Rann Miller directs a 21st Century Community Learning Center, a federally funded after-school program located in southern New Jersey — one of 63 statewide. He spent 6 years teaching in charter schools in Camden, New Jersey. He is the creator, writer and editor of the Official Urban Education Mixtape Blog. His writing on race and urban education has appeared in Education Week, Hechinger Report, and the Progressive, where he is an education fellow. Follow him on Twitter:@UrbanEdDJ and on Instagram: @urbanedmixtape
