Lip Service Is a Luxury We Can’t Afford
I'm aware that Gottlieb & Gottlieb is literally two white guys, but that is as self-conscious as I would like to be. As the saying goes, I’m going to “dance like nobody's watching.”
I really resent when I see other companies and businesses advertising that Black Lives Matter, even though their histories are filled with bigotry, hypocrisy, and wanton criminality.
To choose one example from hundreds, let’s pick on Chase Bank. This too-big-to-fail darling of corporate welfare has recently plastered Black Lives Matter signs across their buildings and storefronts. This same outfit:
Banked for the Nazis
Created the subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately affected People of Color
Systematically denies loans to People of Color
Illegally aided the governments of Cuba, Sudan, Liberia, and Iran
Participated in illegal flood insurance schemes, effectively profiteering off of climate change
Chase is not alone in this. Each year, America’s employers illegally withhold approximately $40 billion in earned wages, nearly three times the value of all other types of theft (e.g. burglary). The corporate interests that pay so much lip service to diversity are as guilty as our government in disenfranchising, manipulating, and abusing People of Color and other marginalized groups.
By “otherizing” racism rather than owning their past bigotry, businesses perpetuate the myth that America’s racism problem is shaped like a burning cross. That just isn't the case. American racism is the racism of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Boston Brahmins. American racism extends from Wall Street on the East Coast to Hollywood on the West.
There is no escape from racism anywhere in this country. It props up the most ordinary of financial and social transactions, even when good people are involved. I knew someone, a white guy, who was the first person in his family to go to college. He worked two jobs, and still his parents had to take out a second mortgage on their house in order to pay tuition. He once told me:
"I seem like some up-by-my-bootstraps white success story. Right? On paper, I should be the kind of person most upset about affirmative action. But that house that we took out a second mortgage on, well, that was above the levees in New Orleans. At the time my grandparents bought it — and it wasn’t that long ago — the whole neighborhood was Whites Only."
As much as I try to understand others’ perspectives, my core experiences are those of an American Jew. Like many American Jews, I received a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a gift for my bar mitzvah. A masterpiece of Holocaust literature, Maus follows Spiegelman’s parents through wartime Poland and Auschwitz while also depicting the strained relationship between the grown author and his aging father. In the second volume, written several years after the first, Spiegelman takes a break from the narrative to address a question:
"Many younger Germans have had it up to here with Holocaust stories. These things happened before they were even born. Why should they feel guilty?"
Spiegelman responds, "Who am I to say? ...Maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!"
It must be said that Black Lives Matter, but saying it is not enough.
Marc Gottlieb
Partner
195 Montague Street
14th Floor
Brooklyn Heights, NY 11201
Marc@GottliebFirm.com
(646) 820-8506