And they co-opt athletes and celebrities while they’re at it.
By Darren McKinney
In his well-worth-reading “Weekend Interview” with The Wall Street Journal, “self-made multimillionaire” entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy speaks of his work to expose corporate wokeism as the fraudulent religion it has become and cites several examples of big companies’ ultimately hypocritical self-dealing [“Can This Man Put Wokeism Out of Business?” Opinion, June 26].
For example, he points to Nike’s sinister use of “slave labor” in China and celebrity athletes to sell “$250 sneakers” to inner city black kids who can’t afford school books. And he says Coca-Cola criticizes Georgia’s voting law and trains its employees to “be less white” because that’s “easier” than confessing its monstrous role in “a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity,” particularly “in the black communities” the company “profess[es] to care about so much.”
Well, I’d no sooner put down my Journal and turned to the Saturday sales circulars in the Washington Post when I was struck by still more evidence supporting Mr. Ramaswamy’s analysis. There was cute-as-a-bug’s-ear, fit-as-a-fiddle Olympic gymnast Simone Biles helping Mondelēz International Inc.’s Nabisco peddle its sugar-enriched Oreos and Chips Ahoy! to those same obese, diabetic and hypertense communities.
Of course, from the snack-seller’s perspective, paying Ms. Biles — an increasingly woke critic of oppression in her own right — to sell more cookies to black children and young adults is a stroke of Blue-Eyed Devil genius. But how badly could this once-in-a-generation athlete and role model need the money if the bargain requires her to aide and abet this corporate bamboozler in hood-winking her young sisters and brothers into poorer health and shorter lives? Were she truly woke, she’d find a more thoughtful agent and righteously Fight the Power!