Monthly Archives: March 2021

In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, protests engulfed U.S. cities during the summer of 2020 as activists, politicians, and everyday citizens demanded changes to the system of policing that has repeatedly resulted in the death of Black citizens at the hands of White police officers. Notably, these demands extended beyond the criminal justice system and led to an examination of the myriad of ways systemic racism and racial inequities pervade daily life in America—from education, to health care, to corporate America. Conversations that initially focused on the role of police within American society turned into larger debates about how to create an America that values Black lives; and these discussion spilled into living rooms, permeated workplaces, and ultimately infiltrated boardrooms across the U.S.

For the first time, since the founding of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2013, many large, well-known corporations publicly aligned themselves with the growing social movement. Corporations’ responses ranged from a lack of support, on one end of the spectrum, to detailed statements in support of BLM, coupled with significant outlays of resources to address systemic inequality both internally and externally. The majority of corporations fell somewhere between these two extremes—that is, most corporations made statements broadly in support of the social movement, but committed to limited or no tangible actions to improve demographic diversity and enhance racial equality within their own corporate structures or their contracting partners’. Our Essay focuses on these corporations in the middle—corporations for which support of BLM has been little more than a marketing campaign. We examine how to incentivize corporations to move away from mere statements and towards the types of actions more likely to tackle systemic racism and racial inequalities in a sustained, meaningful manner. To achieve this goal, we suggest harnessing the power and influence of institutional investors to encourage firms to implement strategies crafted to address discrimination, bias, and racism within firms’ own organizational structures and supply chains.

READ MORE »