Selling Social Justice - by Jennifer C Pan (Paperback)

About the Book

"Investigates the rise and spread of contemporary antiracist ideology and shows how the rich came to embrace this particular form of justice"--

Book Synopsis

Americans have been sold a version of social justice that fails to deliver

The national racial reckoning that began in 2020 promised to radically restructure American society from the bottom up. But five years on, it has mainly served to strengthen the ruling class and deliver the rich an opportunity to rehabilitate a profoundly unequal economic order precisely at a moment when the stability of the system and the public's trust in it are drastically deteriorating.

Corporations have used antiracism to consolidate their political power and evade government regulation. Employers have surveilled and undermined workers through counterproductive diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. Affluent professionals and Democratic politicians have exacerbated a stark class divide by pushing half-baked "racial equity" policies that come at the expense of the majority of working people. And the right has reacted to these developments by stoking a toxic culture war against "wokeness" that serves only as a distraction from the increasing economic hardship faced by Americans of all races.

Selling Social Justice investigates the rise and spread of contemporary antiracist ideology and shows how the rich came to embrace this particular form of justice. In this provocative and thoroughly researched account, Jennifer C. Pan explores why, in a twenty-first-century economy of increasing scarcity, antiracism is the wrong frame for understanding and fighting inequality.

Review Quotes

"The racial reckoning of 2020 has long since collapsed in a puff of corporate DEI initiatives. This book exposes how antiracism was always doomed to be another weapon in the arsenal of corporate power used to distract from the common oppression faced by workers of all races."
--Krystal Ball, co-host of Breaking Points

"A must-read for anyone concerned with the limits of a nominally left politics in the US that has forsaken the pursuit of solidarity around interests and concerns that working people share broadly. It is a cautionary tale about how corporate and nonprofit sector influences have contributed to shaping our views of social justice and how to achieve it--with the effect of strengthening the reactionary right. Jennifer C. Pan's book is beautifully written, meticulously researched, and very intelligently argued."
--Adolph Reed Jr., author of The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

"If you think DEI can help make American society more equal, Pan shows that the only people more mistaken than you are the ones who think getting rid of it will do the job instead. What the American people have been sold by both the neoliberal left and the MAGA right is a vision of social justice that, in making our relation to race and racism the fundamental problem, makes the fundamental solution--'a universalist conception of social welfare'--invisible"
--Walter Benn Michaels, author of No Politics but Class Politics

"Rather than inveighing against D.E.I. or strawmanning c-suite politics, Jennifer C. Pan's beach readishly digestible Selling Social Justice seeks to answer a basic question: Did a national racial reckoning experienced by millions as a series of emails, corporate seminars, and new metrics actually change anything?"
--Andrew Burmon, Upper Middle

"Pan debuts with a methodical dissection of how big business embraced anti-racist ideology in the aftermath of 2020's racial reckoning....It's an incisive call to ask who benefits from corporate social justice initiatives."
--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Jennifer C. Pan is a writer in Los Angeles whose work has appeared in the Nation, the Atlantic, Dissent, Damage, and elsewhere. She was formerly a host of the Jacobin Show and a staff writer at the New Republic.