Selling Social Justice

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 PointsA 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 AfterlivesIf 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 PoliticsRather 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 *

Jen Pan is the co-host of the Jacobin Show (50,000 subscribers). She is a former staff writer at The New Republic and has written for the Nation, the Atlantic, Jacobin, and Dissent, and her work has been cited by New York Magazine, Gawker, Jezebel, Longreads, and other outlets.