June 3, 2024 - #mondaymoment #capitalism #liberation
Happy Monday and Happy Pride Month, my friends! If you’ve been reading Monday Moments for a while, you know I always mention the idea of rainbow capitalism around the beginning and end of Pride Month. Rainbow capitalism is the use of pride flag for marketing purposes and the use of LGBTQIA+ stories to show how “inclusive” or “affirming” a company is or wants to be. These companies want to tap into the nearly 1.4 trillion dollar purchasing power of the LGBTQIA+ community in the United States and the almost four trillion dollar purchasing power of the global Queer community. As a result, if you were refreshing the websites of major companies at 12am on June 1 you would have seen a larger number switch their logos to a version with rainbow colors. Skeptical? Watch those same websites at 12:01am on July 1 as they all switch back to their normal logos.
Perhaps this year more than recent years we are witnessing the limits and inherent problems of rainbow capitalism. For instance, last year Target received extensive negative press from conservative and Evangelical Christian organizations because of their Pride merchandise. After several high-profile incidents, they began pulling items from their stores. Rather than stand with the Queer community, Target showed that they were only in it for the publicity, and they began down playing their Pride-related products. In early May of this year Target announced that they were scaling back which stores would offer their Pride collection based on “historical sales performance.”
Whatever your opinion of rainbow capitalism and the ways in which corporations highlight their acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people, we have to remember that our liberation is tied up in the liberation of all other people and groups. This is what we call bounded liberation or the concept that no one can be free until everyone is free. During Pride Month 2024, we’re faced with companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin simultaneously being, at least on paper, major supporters of LGBTQIA+ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and the National LGBTQ+ Task Force and also being two of the largest producers of the weapons, platforms, and systems of war being used in the ongoing war and genocide in Israel/Palestine and the war in Ukraine.
Liberation is far from a simple task and often when we feel like we’ve figured out one string of it we realize there are two more which require our attention. However, that’s also how we discover that there are other experiences and other stories beyond what we’ve lived.
How do you learn about the intersections in your liberation? How is your liberation used as a tactic by companies?
Let us pray: God, help us remember that our liberation, our freedom is bound up in the liberation and freedom of all other people. You teach us that we must work for justice for our entire human family with the same tenacity with which we work for our own justice. In all things, dear God, hold us, support us, and give us courage. May it be so. Amen.
Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben
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