Good Riddance to Corporate Pride

For years now, it’s been a rather safe bet for major brands to deck themselves out in rainbows every June. The LGBT issue, once at the center of America’s culture war, seemed to have settled into a comfortable consensus, allowing brands to boldly champion the cause, exuding an aura of cutting-edge progressiveness, all the while treading on safe ground.

In 2023, however, this kind of corporate allyship, what some call “rainbow capitalism,” is no longer guaranteed to help generate revenue. It may in fact be a financial liability. Bud Light faced a boycott over its partnership with a trans activist; Target took a hit for its line of LGBT kids’ apparel that included trans apparel; and PetSmart has come under fire for its Pride-themed dog ensembles.

The transformation of Pride from a march into a month-long rainbow-saturated consumerist bacchanal was never about allyship or support. It was about profit. 

In response, brands are trying to do damage control. Bud Light has released a twangy, pickup-trucky advertisement pandering to heterosexual America; Target has pulled some of the Pride merch; and other brands are keeping quiet. This makes plain something that should have been obvious from the start: The transformation of Pride from a march into a month-long rainbow-saturated consumerist bacchanal was never about allyship or support. It was about profit. Threaten a costly boycott, and the rainbows disappear. The equation was never more complicated than that. 

One response might be to demand a more authentic and enduring show of support from brands. “The last thing the LGBT community needs right now is fair-weather friends,” Soleil Ho wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “What would actually keep corporate diversity gestures from being shallow would be working for LGBT rights year-round; not just in June during pride.”

This, however, is precisely the wrong approach. There is, in fact, no way to keep corporate diversity gestures from being shallow. This is their nature, and the suggestion that year-round rainbows would do the trick reveals the extent to which we are deluded about the game these companies are playing.

Instead, we should say good riddance to corporate Pride, and we should stop swooning when major companies signal allegiance to political causes. These gestures are meaningless, soulless, and insincere. They are also unnecessary. Why do I need the Container Store to tell me to “organize with pride”? What good will it accomplish to swish Listerine from a rainbow bottle or to eat gray Skittles because, as the packaging proclaims, “only one rainbow matters during Pride”?

Woke marketing is often a smokescreen designed to hide gruesome labor practices and extractive manufacturing processes.

These acts of corporate virtue signaling are grating and offensive in their condescension. They are also a distraction from the real ways in which companies make a (often negative) impact on the world. For example, Nike can play progressive by partnering with Colin Kaepernick despite having actively lobbied to block legislation that would threaten their ability to use forced labor from persecuted Uighur Muslims in China. Woke marketing is often a smokescreen designed to hide gruesome labor practices and extractive manufacturing processes.

We are embarrassingly naive about our corporate overlords. We think that Elon Musk will solve climate change and build a new world for us on Mars. We think that Disney is an ally fighting the good fight. In truth, there are no corporate saviors. They are profiteers. They want your money and they’ll do what they can in order to get it. We would do well to be a bit more skeptical, guarding our wallets and resisting garish rainbow-colored attempts to claim our loyalty and our paychecks. As serfs in a hyperconsumerist society, we are trained to think that the best way to live our values is to buy products from companies whose marketing panders to those values. This is a sign of how deeply the logic of brand identity and consumerism has dominated our political imaginations. 

Yes, we should demand fair labor practices and fair trade practices, but such things come about as a result of pressure from regulators and labor organizers — they are not dreamt up by marketing departments or DEI consultants. 

The revolution will not be sold at Target. It will not be made in a sweatshop. It won’t come in a six-pack. The work of Pride is the work of building community and striving for equality. It is the pursuit of the dream of a more just society. It needs believers, not sponsors.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020).