Off Flavours Part I: On Craft Beer's Corporatized Pseudo-Solidarity and the Legacies of Beer's Whiteness
The following is the first part in a three part series exploring recent trends of reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement and wider expressions of solidarity across the craft beer and brewing industries
Corporate Solidarity and the Whitewashing of a Movement
In recent weeks and months, spurred on by Black Lives Matter and wider international antiracist solidarity-focused protest movements, many in the beer industry have finally sat up and begun to look inward, examining both the industry’s and their own participation in and perpetuation of racism and oppression.
What has followed is a slew of white-owned and/or white-led beer-focused businesses, mainly breweries, pubs and bars, suddenly making a variety of solidarity-inspired or apology-led social media posts, announcing their intentions to 'do better', 'listen and learn more', and other variations on explicitly conditional business-oriented alliances with the antiracist movement. This attitudinal shift occurred after many sensed that the Overton window with regards to the catastrophe of institutional racism’s lethality toward marginalized peoples, particularly Black communities, had transformed from passive acceptance to recalcitrant antagonism and outright rejection.
In expressing their support for these movements though, and like many other corporate actors, most, if not almost all beer-related businesses have diluted the concerns and aims set out by these movements’ leaders and members — the people risking their lives daily on the streets. As a result, such statements of solidarity have often been stripped of some of the movement and activists’ core principles, sentiments and desired actions.
Solidarity and justice-oriented organizing groups have long placed anticapitalism at the forefront of their antiracism. Yet, at first glance, it would appear that most in the craft beer industry are more intent on their brand’s newly strengthened 'inclusivity' primarily orienting itself toward establishing and/or encouraging new custom from people of colour, rather than redressing their own role in ongoing racialized societal unfairness.
Instead of implementing actual socioeconomic justice in their communities, disavowing and calling for the abandonment or defunding of the inherent violence of law enforcement, and fully supporting such activism focused initiatives, many have simply followed the classic neoliberal line of assimilation and incorporation. The fact remains, no matter how many Black customers you have, no matter how many employees of colour, women and/or LGBTQIA+ workers and customers who walk through your doors, the exploitative employer/employee relationship inherent to wage labour, the valuing and protection of private property over lives, and the profit motive still underscore the modern brewing industry.
Regardless of the currency of their takings, the vast majority of breweries, bars and associated beer-related businesses are corporate entities allied with, and inseparable from, the continually malleable and self-adapting twin projects of whiteness and capitalism. For many, these recent commitments to so-called 'equality, diversity and inclusion' ring hollow. Instead, they are little more than now long-already too late and impossible promises to dry hop their continual pursuit of profit with a late addition of justice.
To be blunt: racial, social, cultural and economic justice, both globally and within the craft beer community are incompatible with our current social model and relations, which remain run by and for whiteness and underpinned by the systems of racialized capitalism. Justice comes at a cost, but it remains a price that few are willing to pay.
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