Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism

by Jennifer C. Pan, Jennifer C.Pan

The national racial reckoning that began in 2020 promised to radically restructure American society from the bottom up. But five years on, it has mainly served to strengthen the ruling class and deliver the rich an opportunity to rehabilitate a profoundly unequal economic order precisely at a moment when the stability of the system and the public's trust in it are drastically deteriorating.

Corporations have used antiracism to consolidate their political power and evade government regulation. Employers have surveilled and undermined workers through counterproductive diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. Affluent professionals and Democratic politicians have exacerbated a stark class divide by pushing half-baked "racial equity" policies that come at the expense of the majority of working people. And the right has reacted to these developments by stoking a toxic culture war against "wokeness" that serves only as a distraction from the increasing economic hardship faced by Americans of all races.

Selling Social Justice investigates the rise and spread of contemporary antiracist ideology and shows how the rich came to embrace this particular form of justice. In this provocative and thoroughly researched account, Jennifer C. Pan explores why, in a twenty-first-century economy of increasing scarcity, antiracism is the wrong frame for understanding and fighting inequality.

Genres: Politics

190 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 6, 2025

Reviews

[mlem · Rating 1 out of 5]

This author has a very hard time accepting that two things can be true at once and kind of struggles to concede that capitalism is bad and racism does in fact exist. The tone is so pessimistic and scathing it is almost hard to read, and is actually offensive to the senses. She uses terminology like "black and brown" in a purposefully condescending way to talk about people who have lost their homes. Why??? The pervasiveness of these side-comments and innuendos is not even just unnecessarily disrespectful but actually annoying. Instead of striking and provocative (which i am assuming is how she wants to be perceived), she comes across edgy and flat. There is also no direction : she jumps from trying to explain the foundational cracks in the democratic party to the imaginary racism (?) of the Republican Party to the harm social marxism has caused to American politics (?) to the defense of a‘white’ opioid crisis (her take is that 'white people go to prison too') to a staunch and almost concerning vindication of the New Deal. Her inability to explain or even intelligently comment on the existence of multitudes not only diminishes her ability to actually say anything of value but turns the book into just a bunch of twitter quotes and random statistics from the 2000s. She is also obsessed with the word “obscure”... I think I counted 5+ times where she finalises a chapter of random inflammatory remarks with “and really what’s happening here is that the democrats’ obsession with racism is OBSCURING the real economic issues at hand”. Literally like 5 times she makes this statement and then moves on to an entirely new chapter? Yes there is a wider gap between rich black people and poor black people than between poor black people and poor white people. What is she trying to say? She actually goes on to say that improving racial wealth gaps is discouraged because really it would only go towards the top 10% of black people anyways. What? The TLDR is that this book is edge lord pandering criticism of everything and analysis of nothing. I had medium hope because a critique of dei and the relationship between economic scarcity and rising racial resentment is relevant to my research but i was mostly just uncomfortable and confused. I think writing about radical and or experimental topics requires a professional and insightful relationship to the ideas that this author lacks completely.