Since the racial reckoning triggered by the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, corporations have opened their checkbooks and flashed their woke credentials. Much of their spending — by one account more than $200 billion — has been focused on legally and morally questionable programs that give benefits to individuals based solely on the color of their skin. In short, the corporate response to George Floyd was largely to support nonwhite businesses and organizations serving nonwhite communities.
But now, in the face of growing lawsuits, and with encouragement from groups like the World Economic Forum, corporations are off-loading their social justice agendas to outside groups. This new type of woke laundering is problematic because corporations are obtaining the publicity they crave (being recognized as a “woke corporation”) while at the same time minimizing or eliminating potential legal liabilities that could result from race discrimination. This is a dangerous moral hazard, especially for a civil society that values equality and nondiscrimination.
The path to woke laundering started at the beginning in 2020, when the World Economic Forum encouraged business leaders to turn their companies into “corporate activists: companies that take concrete action” to change society. And many of the largest companies heeded this call, setting up their own racial-justice programs.
Amazon, for example, created its own program called the “Black Business Accelerator,” a program offering a “suite of resources” only to black-owned businesses. Other businesses — those owned by whites, Asians, and Hispanics — were ineligible for the
