Jennifer C. Pan: Selling Social Justice | Doomscroll

Every Fortune 500 company has a DEI office, DEI officers, some sort of DEI programs in place. Something that I discuss in my book is that it could also be going to union busters. They will help a company do some union busting, but at the same time, they'll also offer them a DEI package. Do you get a discount?

Exactly. Yeah. If you bundle the two services, even if you don't buy all of that and you think, you know, corporations, no, no, no, no, it was co-optation. Why was it so easy for them to hijack or to co-opt this supposedly grassroots movement?

D EI sometimes just belonging. I've seen Jedi, J E D I justice like Star Wars. Listen Josh, I'm only telling you what I've seen. Did woke help to put Trump in office?

[Music] Welcome to Doomscroll. I'm your host Joshua Cinderella. My guest is Jennifer Pan, a writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, Descent, The Atlantic, and Damage Magazine. She was formerly a host of the Jacaban show and a staff writer at the New Republic.

She is the author of Selling Social Justice out now from Verso Books. I think there's a hazard that if we don't talk about this, our political opponents definitely will. Yeah. And there are penalties for having these conversations.

You get either directly called out, you get punished in the workplace, you get attacked on social media. If you don't want to implement DEI everywhere, yes. What What do you have as a proposal? What would you prefer instead?

Um, universal social democratic programs. So, health care for all, a jobs guarantee, jobs for all, college for all, education for all. It It sounds boring, uh, because it is. It's just really hard to to implement.

Why would we assume that universal policies would benefit black people, for example? It's basically the only thing that ever has. Uh, and that's not to say that discrimination uh or anti-discrimination law is not important. Clearly, it is.

Uh but if you think about the period during which black people saw the most upward mobility during which the wage differential between black and white workers shrank the most. It's during this period that we now call the great compression right when the economic fortunes of all Americans kind of started to converge. That's the period between 1940 and 1970 ...