Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress (eBook)

The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that challenged many institutions, including for-profit companies, to reflect on how to address racial inequality. Between 2020 and 2024, corporations made systematic public statements to show alignment with causes that impact people of color. Corporations also used those public statements to protect their financial reputations against claims that their businesses may perpetuate racial inequality. Then in 2024, in response to conservative pushback, corporations began to retract the public commitments they previously made.

Disclosureland argues that this process and others – including rhetoric that leaves out past corporate involvement in racial inequality, using disclosures about race as evidence of action toward addressing racial inequality, or pulling back on disclosures about race in response to conservatives – constrain true racial progress. Even when corporations made pledges to hire and promote people of color or fund racial equity causes through philanthropy, the book demonstrates how these pledges functioned to limit corporate responsibility. Critical, corrective, and hopeful, Disclosureland calls on a future functioning federal government and corporate stakeholders to regulate corporate race-conscious words to achieve true racial progress.