The Price Is White
I: It’s your bestie, a business!
Brands cannot stand to be on the outside looking in. With the emergence of “how do you do, fellow kids?” marketing—influencers, sponsored TikTok streams, and funny Super Bowl commercials—there is an endless list of brands trying to be “relevant.” This relevance translates into the marketplace, the thinking goes, with brand “loyalty” and “affinity.” But relevance is not enough. Brands want to be loved. They want a relationship. And like all relationships with delusional narcissists, they believe themselves in the keystone position of consuming that love. Hence: “community.”
As we have discussed, the outdoor industry sees itself as transcending race. It sees its products and lifestyles as immune from racial dynamics, with the tiresome “rock doesn’t see color” and “the outdoors can’t be racist” canards wearing deep grooves into the discourse. But the exteriority of race, far from being a liability, was a virtue for outdoors brands. It allowed them, in effect, to have it both ways.
Many climbing spaces have branded themselves as communities because, on the surface, climbing is a perfect fit for the idea. Safe climbing means reliance on others, often with your life. It is a unique mix of individual achievement and group reliance, often done in far-flung locations that require cooperation, coordination, and a shared ethos to pursue effectively. If BIPOC individuals don’t feel safe in that community or don’t feel included or invited—well, it’s not the community’s fault. It welcomes everything and everyone.
But this universalism is, paradoxically, the exclusive factor of climbing “communities.” It includes everyone, starting with retrograde conservatives who want to "keep politics out of climbing” and wounded man-children whose identities are threatened by affinity spaces and events. Don’t they, brands argue, also have a right to that space? Racial capitalism—deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person—is not a separate branch of colonialism but rather a new and more overt co-opting of “the movement” into another form of capitalism. This is why the colorblindness of the outdoor industry is a potent example of our collective failure to understand Popper’s “Paradox of Intolerance.” White people in climbing largely ignore the simple, central problem: the thing they love deeply is harmful to people of color. That tolerance for subtle bigotry is functionally identical to ratification of outright bigotry.
II: The Value of Whiteness
Capitalism is colonialism. Like colonialism, capitalism does not create; it takes and transmutes something that does not belong to it to serve its own purposes. It is an ideology of exploitation whose tenacious grip on our economic and social lives is intimately related to its unnerving lack of principles. Capitalism can only take and adjust itself infinitely to do the extraction more often and efficiently. Like feudalism, colonialism is an extension of the same impulse: Power, signified by capital, is the only thing that matters, so changing the clothing that cloaks power is inconsequential. Capitalism is unkillable, infinitely flexible, with no identity to critique or strip.
Modern capitalists wear this anti-ideology like a badge of honor, with triumphant proclamations about “synergy” and “pivoting” to “meet market demand.” Capitalism has no mandate for virtue or real community—it has no limits. There is only the more refined piracy of the modern market where every scintilla of personhood is commodified. And the ultimate commodity in capitalism isn’t wheat futures, currency markets, or fuel speculations; it is race.
In Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal), Homer Plessy stated that his whiteness was the "most valuable sort of property ... the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity." Nonwhiteness had a different economic value, one that informs the central conceit of white supremacy culture: whiteness is potential freedom from economic exploitation, and Blackness is the inevitability of such exploitation. Colonialists have long exploited Black bodies for capital, from enslavement to the modern prison complex. And for the outdoor industry, nonwhite bodies were largely immaterial and could be “invited” without real effort. “You don’t want to come into an all-white space with white rules, assumptions, and a veritable fountain of white privilege? You don’t feel safe or valued? How sensitive! It’s reverse racism!” By being invited but not fully participating in white spaces, the argument goes that BIPOC individuals are self-segregating from the community. The responsibility, as always, is on nonwhite people to solve the problems of whiteness.
This is where capitalism’s insidious brilliance is on full display. It makes just enough space for nonwhite successes that it can point to “equal opportunity.” OJ Simpson famously remarked: “I’m not Black, I’m OJ.” Ok. Nonwhiteness is still defined in its relationship to whiteness. OJ’s point: I don’t want to be a great Black athlete; I want to be a great athlete, period. Capitalism claims to hold this egalitarian principle as central—it doesn't see race, only achievement. But whiteness can only allow for that power to be glimpsed, never touched. Chris Rock once joked: “Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check... is wealthy.” The great book club of 2020, or whatever we call the micro-movement for Black lives that evaporated as quickly as it materialized, created a tremendous opportunity for racial capitalism. It allowed brands to shower the nonwhite community with riches while still hoarding all the wealth for its white, majoritarian capitalist bourgeoise.
III: DEI is a scam
Antiblackness, as practiced by white supremacy culture, is centered on dispossession. It severs the ties between Blackness, other nonwhite bodies, and institutions that might benefit or enhance their quality of life. Whiteness will harm itself to keep benefits from nonwhite bodies because equally distributed benefits would imply equality. During desegregation, white people shut down pools for everyone rather than allowing for integration. There will never be universal health care in this country for the simple fact that Black people would also receive it. Like a toddler holding its breath, Whiteness will die before it will share. By dispossessing nonwhite persons from the wealth of institutions (the central thesis of critical race theory is that institutions are literally designed with this dispossession in mind), the central tension of separation is maintained and enforced automatically.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is the newest mutation in the war against nonwhite bodies, and it’s effective precisely because it seems like it’s addressing the “real issues.” By centering “diversity” (diversity from what? From a white majority), DEI gives capitalism the ultimate sheep's clothing: the outward appearance of communitarian, egalitarian virtues, with all of the voracious mechanisms of exploitation firmly intact.
DEI is effective because it co-opts many nonwhite people, sick and tired of decades and centuries of failed attempts at reconciliation, into doing its dirty work for it. DEI is not about improving conditions for nonwhite people, it is about making whiteness feel as though it’s doing “everything it can” to address racial issues and therefore absolving it of its historical, social, and economic context. But colonial imperialism has used this technique—divide and conquer—for a long time. How do we know DEI is performative? Look at the results. Of the 50 billion pledged dollars to improve equity in corporate spaces, 250 million is all that’s been spent. Riches in the face of wealth. The easiest way to win a fight is to convince the other guy that they won.
And DEI, tellingly, has magnified the triple oppression of womanhood—emphasizing race, sex, and subordinate positionality while demanding that women of color, like always, be the carriers of the burden, the solvers of the problem, and the soothing reassurance for whiteness. DEI has looked to women to lead, volunteer, educate, wrangle, confront, forgive, and sublimate their own existence under the banner of racial reconciliation. DEI could not exist without Black women continuing to carry the burden for white people because DEI is not separate from white supremacy; it is its most potent and lethal form. It loudly proclaims to understand and care about dispossession and pretends that this rhetorical exercise is identical to understanding and action to dismantle it. But dispossession is a magic trick—stealing the watch of the person whose hand you are shaking and then blaming them for their gullibility and trust.
Vu Le at NonprofitAF articulates some of the many ways that white supremacy appears in institutions, even ones that profess Equity as a core value. I’ll highlight #14: “You have a DEI committee that is given very little power and can only make recommendations that are often ignored (by mostly white senior leaders and board members); that’s white supremacy.” Climbing gyms across the country did exactly this; they “reckoned” with the issue by convincingly appearing to reckon with it. What’s changed? Not much. White men still profit from the community, and Black women still bear the blame and responsibility for failing to integrate satisfactorily with whiteness.
What’s worse, companies can hang a Black Lives Matter flag in a window or a pride flag and cloak themselves in the appearance of righteousness without even accounting for their history, their present problems, or the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of their leadership. The short attention span of the so-called “woke” white “allies” (both horrific and problematic terms) meant that the appetite and bandwidth were only for the appearance of change. This is easily accomplished with a few $20 books from Amazon, a black square on social media, and a #blm appended to posts. The appearance of virtue is a powerful drug because it makes white actors feel productive without ever having to feel bad. And corporations, freshly chastised for their whiteness, maleness, and general shittiness, were handed the perfect tool to disguise themselves. Long “investigations” that outlasted interest, easy signals, and no real changes are the order of the day.
Capital is infinitely patient, but virtue signals travel only a short distance.
-Rob
References
News
The Commodification And Capitalization Of The Anti-Racism Industry
How capitalism reduced diversity to a brand - Vox
The Commoditization of Diversity. A short essay on the social, economic… | by Mustefa Jo’shen
Reactive DEI vs Proactive DEI — Crescendo
Ep 59 – The “WHY” of “DEI” – The Lowdown on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
How Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives are Failing Us - BlackHer.us
6 Types of Environmental Racism
Waking up: Will the outdoor industry ever get DEI right?
Is Diversity Just a Marketing Strategy for Gear Brands? - Outside Online
Transforming the Outdoors for True Inclusion | by BBMG | B The Change
Five Ways to Make the Outdoors More Inclusive - Sponsor Content - REI
Why Color Blindness Is a Counterproductive Ideology - The Atlantic
Scholarly
Henne, K., Shelby, R., & Jenna, H. (2021). The Datafication of #MeToo: Whiteness, Racial Capitalism, and Anti-Violence Technologies. Big Data & Society, 8(2).
Radcliffe, S. A. (2020). Geography and indigeneity III: Co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in indigeneity’s economies. Progress in Human Geography, 44(2), 374-388.
Day, I. (2020). Racial capitalism, colonialism, and death-dealing abstraction. American Quarterly, 72(4), 1033-1046.
Sakshi. (2021). The many entanglements of capitalism, colonialism and indigenous environmental justice. Soundings (London, England), 78(78), 64-80.
Noonan, J. (2019). Capitalism, colonialism, and the war on human life: A review of ethics of liberation in the age of globalization and exclusion by enrique dussel. Historical Materialism : Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 27(1), 253-268.
McClure, E. S., Vasudevan, P., Bailey, Z., Patel, S., & Robinson, W. R. (2020). Racial capitalism within public health-how occupational settings drive covid-19 disparities. American Journal of Epidemiology, 189(11), 1244-1253.
Leong, N. (2013). racial capitalism. Harvard Law Review, 126(8), 2151-2226.
Burden-Stelly, C. (2020). Modern U.S. racial capitalism: Some theoretical insights. Monthly Review (New York. 1949), 72(3), 8-20.
Bethan Harries, Bridget Byrne, Lindsey Garratt & Andy Smith (2020) “Divide and conquer”. Anti-racist and community organizing under austerity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43:16, 20-38.
