--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Vox is turning 10. And in typical Vox fashion, we're celebrating by explaining stuff. But not the regular stuff. We're marking a decade of explaining the news by looking back at a decade of turning points. Moments that changed everything, or at least felt like they were gonna.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On Today Explained, we're going to talk about George Floyd. So, shout out to his family.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so after all that happened, 2020 was supposed to be this major turning point for progress because, of course, people would see such a gruesome murder and say, we have to change. But instead of that happening, it turned out to be a period of backlash instead.
--:-- [Music starts playing softly]
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: The political and cultural backlash to America's racial reckoning coming up on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 2020, 2020, 2020. Today explained from Vox, and Vox's Fabiola Cineas is here to remind us about 2020, just in case you, you know, tried to banish it from your old memory bank.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: Yeah, it was quite the year. George Floyd was killed outside of a store in Minneapolis.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: And the only reason why we knew about it was because a bystander, Darnella Frazier, who was a teen at the time, recorded this killing.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: So Derek Chauvin was kneeling on George Floyd's neck. I heard George Floyd saying, I can't breathe. Please get off of me. I can't breathe.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: He cried for his mom. He was in pain. And so she posts this video online and then by the next day, people are out in the streets.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: I'm tired of my black men and my black women being shot, being killed by the NYPD. I'm tired of it. I have three black men in my home. I'm tired. I am tired.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: It really looked like for a moment there, there was going to be change. It started out with people recognizing that systemic injustice, systemic racism were real.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: I have benefited from white privilege all of my life. I'm an old white guy. I can go to the store and not get followed.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: People started recognizing how the police carry out a lot of state violence. And so people started putting up black squares on their Instagram profiles because they wanted it to be a blackout.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: They were just like, industry needs to stop. Social media needs to stop because something so serious happened.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: And so that was everyone's collective way to say, I recognize what's happening and I want to be a part of the solution.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: I will no longer allow an unchecked moment. I will no longer allow racist, hurtful words, jokes, stereotypes, no matter how big or small, to be uttered in my presence.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: We had anti-racism books flying off of the shelves. So folks like Robin DiAngelo, Ibra McSkendi.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: You have racial disparities in the United States, in Canada, in other countries. And there's only two causes of, you know, racial disparities.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: Either certain groups are better or worse than others. And that's why they have more. Or racist policy.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: Because they were leading the way and saying, hey, this is how you can be an anti-racist. This is how you can recognize your white privilege and be a part of.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: On behalf of Caucasian people. I remember seeing a video or maybe even a photo of just, like, black people sitting in chairs, and there were white people kneeling on the floor, washing their feet.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: Yes, Father, it's our honor to stand here on behalf of all white. We can't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: There was immediate backlash, right? There was an effort to characterize protests as riots, even if people weren't rioting, or especially if they were.
--:-- Fabiola Cineas: There were people who were immediately backlashing against this moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, there was certainly immediate backlash. We had the president, right, Donald Trump, sending out so many tweets a day talking about how governors, mayors need to step up and call in the police or, you know, certain governors need to call in the National Guard to help control protesters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mayors and governors must establish an overwhelming law enforcement presence until the violence has been quelled.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's all in reaction to the protests, whether they were, you know, peaceful or violent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're not even talking about policy, but of course this cultural moment leads to a bunch of policy proposals too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, state legislature is trying to ban the use of no-knock warrants, for example.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, Louisville's mayor signed Breonna's Law after the Metro Council unanimously banned the use of no-knock warrants, a controversial practice that gives police authority to enter a home without announcing themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We saw just a movement, a progressive movement to try to defund the police. So we'll take some funds that have been going toward the militarization of police departments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We stop doing that all of these assault weapons and we will bring in mental health professionals and psychologists and counselors where there are people who are being treated as if they not ill mentally ill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we know that they are. And policing cannot deal with what ails them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we also saw just a movement, a cultural movement. So people were like, we need to remove statues.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We need to change the name of schools, change the names of various buildings and military bases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then more broadly, in schools and other institutions, we see an attention to just even talking about racism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So structural inequality and structural racism wasn't something that was a part of everyday vocabulary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now we had surveys from Pew saying that white people were recognizing what these terms mean and that these things were real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so the federal government and other places basically pledged to carry out diversity, equity and inclusion trainings to basically make sure that employees and students were better versed on what all of this meant.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a backlash to George Floyd and Black Lives Matter immediately.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then it sort of seems to grow significantly. How does it grow?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I do want to mention, for example, like Kyle Rittenhouse showed up to a protest in August 2020, killed two protesters and wounded another in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rittenhouse was interviewed shortly before the shootings and was asked if he was using nonlethal rounds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We don't have nonlethal. So you guys are full on ready to defend the property. Yes, we are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was a huge moment because this is someone who was there supposedly to carry out vigilante justice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of people in the moment saw it as wrong. But then about a year later in 2021, he was acquitted of all charges.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he was able to just walk away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we see a movement to ban books across a number of states where in Florida, they were like taping up school books.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so when you look at the book bans, you see that a lot of the books that are being banned are books that are written by authors of color or maybe they feature characters of color or maybe they are books that have LGBTQ themes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so book bans then carry us to the next thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Since the 2020 election, the Brennan Center for Justice has identified 177 bills introduced in state legislatures across the country that the group says would make it harder for people to vote and for those votes to be counted fairly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so these laws basically limit, for example, the number of hours that voters have to vote.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They limit where voters can go to vote.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so a lot of those methods that were limited were the methods that people of color, disabled voters, poor voters used to vote in the 2020 election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Civil rights groups and Democrats say it's a deliberate attempt to suppress black and brown voters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I will be damned if I let the fight of my forefathers, my ancestors looking at me, and I roll over and lay down and allow them to do this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we will fight in here. You fight out here and we will win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think it will come to surprise to like a lot of maybe progressive Americans or people who are ready to see reform in the wake of George Floyd's death.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That like Ron DeSantis is going to try and backpedal for political points, for his own beliefs, whatever it might be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then like just a few weeks ago, we had two schools in Virginia renaming themselves after Confederate generals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's Stonewall Jackson High School that was renamed to Mountain View High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School was renamed to Honey Run.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A local advocacy group began pushing for the change back after it did a survey finding most people there in the county preferred the old names.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, critics also say the board rushed through the change in 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is going on there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it's a scary reality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think a lot of people definitely weren't surprised because I think a lot of people recognize what our history is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People recognize that this backlash and these reversals are part of the American story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so to hear that two schools are renaming themselves after Confederate leaders is, To me, I was shocked.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But at the same time, it's like sad to think that they held on to this, you know, for a couple of years until, you know, they waited until it was OK to come back out and say, actually, we want these names back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they likely have so much support, which is why it was able to happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what does that mean? Does that mean that we shouldn't be surprised to see Virginia schools renaming themselves after Confederate generals?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does that mean that we should expect there to be reversals?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I think it's okay to be surprised by it because it really is such a major move, especially with just all the things that we thought would happen in 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think it's okay to be surprised. Whether we should expect it, sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It just feels like this is a pattern that constantly happens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When progress happens, we get pushback.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think it's also fair to expect it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Backlash is kind of hard to measure, but one way to do it is to take a look at the brands.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll do so when Today Explained returns.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not anymore, says Built Rewards.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community, and Built wants you to go out and do things in the community.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members every month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you're ready to travel, they say Built points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining built.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It almost fall and that means it time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit let be real layering is even more fun.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Add a statement shoe to your collection, like the calf hair loafers from Steve Madden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: or tap into your romantic side with flowy dresses from CC and sheer pieces from INC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Shop in-store or online at macy's.com.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I would love to know. Please email me, noelle at king dot com.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, Upwork.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 2020, 2020, 2020. Today Explained has returned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram and we are joined by Michael Serrazio.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: He's a communications professor at Boston College.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Broadly speaking, I study how the media gets produced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So first book was about the advertising industry. Second book was about sports media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just did a book, the most recent book, which is called The Authenticity Industries, was all about how America is obsessed with authenticity and how that's manufactured for us and faked for us in politics and advertising and entertainment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We asked Michael to remind us how brands went all in on racial justice in 2020.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: So you have a wide range of approaches. You have ads from Nike. They had an ad called Don't Do It, and it was basically don't turn your back on racism, don't be silent about the inequities that people of color face.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: You had an ad from Old Navy that had the title and theme, We Are We. There's a world of possibility that can't exist with you versus me.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: It will take work. That's indisputable. But oh man, it could be beautiful. This world where we are we.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Generic sort of pro-diversity messaging.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: You had Ben & Jerry's launching a podcast that was all about America's long history of racial violence and discrimination.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I think we produced it. Oh, really? Okay.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: This is Who We Are, a podcast by Ben & Jerry's and produced by Vox Creative.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I'm Carvel Wallace.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: You had Uber putting an ad out that said, delete our app if you tolerate racism.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: So you've got a really wide range of companies that are putting their messages out.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: You have a wide range of investment in that.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: By one tally, the Washington Post tallied $50 billion in corporate pledges toward racial equity causes at this time.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Wow. And a lot of that money was dedicated toward scholarships.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: A lot of that money was going toward funding online creators, influencers.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: A lot of that money was trying to designate toward improving disparities in the employment at these corporations themselves.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: So you had in this summer of 2020 when brands are trying to be relevant in the culture.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: They see what's happening in the culture. It's a protest moment around this cause and this issue.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And they jump on it in full.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And we spent a bunch of our time in the first half of the show talking about BLM.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: But what you're talking about here wasn't just about racial justice.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: No, the lead up to that was broadly a kind of brand politics that took hold during the Trump era.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Racial justice was one component of that, but you had a number of other causes that got wrapped up in that.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Levi's and Delta aligning themselves with gun control.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Chip Berg, the CEO of Levi Strauss & Company, released a statement Wednesday saying the company does not want guns on any of its properties unless carried by a law enforcement official.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: It went on to say it boils down to this. You should not have to be concerned about your safety while shopping for clothes or trying on a pair of jeans.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Patagonia giving back its $10 million tax cut in response to what they deemed an irresponsible piece of legislation from the Trump administration.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And the kind of kickoff for a lot of this, like, brand activism was the inauguration of Trump in January of 2017.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: America first. America first.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Had the Super Bowl that year, which is basically the time when America cares about advertising.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Like, most of the time, Americans are desperate to avoid advertising.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: But there's three hours every year that we actually pay attention to it.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And it was at that moment that you had a series of ads that were kind of oriented toward immigration issues.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I want to brew a beer. Welcome to America. We got water here. Go back home.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And that was, you know, one of the most kind of politicized Super Bowl ad moments of all time.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: So what had been building throughout the late 2010s with Trump crescendoed with the Black Lives Matter advertising of 2020.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Could you tell us when brands started caring about racial justice?
--:-- Michael Serrazio: So you had the Black Lives Matter movement taking shape in the mid to late 2010s.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And you would have occasional instances of brands trying to glom onto that in some way, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I think the successful ads would be ones like Procter Gamble did an ad called The Talk Now when you get pulled over Mom I a good driver Baby don worry This is not about you getting a ticket This is about you not coming home.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Less successful during that kind of run-up to 2020 would be ads like Pepsi's Kendall Jenner quasi-protest ad.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Within the ad industry, trade press was considered by many to be the worst ad of all time.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: That bad? Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I mean, I remember reading in some of the trades, you know, just how much it was panned.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And they pulled it and they, you know, acknowledged it was very tone deaf.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And there was, you know, lots of blame to go around for that one.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And then another one would be Starbucks at one point in the mid to late 2010s did an initiative called Race Together, where they were trying to get baristas and customers to strike up a conversation about racial injustice.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I remember that. Yikes.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Which, you know, again, I mean, it created, similar to the Pepsi ad, an incredible amount of derision on the internet.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I mean, it was perfect fodder for sarcasm on Twitter.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And then there's this one. Not sure what Starbucks was thinking.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I don't have time to explain 400 years of oppression to you and still make my train.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: But the reason this is essential to our conversation is because, like all the backlash we talked about in the first half of the show, there is a brand backlash.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Yes, or at least a retreat on the part of brands in the years since 2020.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: In the way that you can easily call to mind examples of brands doing Black Lives Matter-related ads, it's very hard to call to mind brands having a take or doing advertising around the Dobbs decision that wound up reversing Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Brands have not had any interest whatsoever in getting themselves involved with the Israel-Palestine war.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And there has been this reversal in some of the survey data around this where American consumers increasingly say that they're not interested in brands taking political stands or op-lining on current events.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: So there's been this kind of reversal in consumer sentiments.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Maybe everyone saw what happened to Bud Light.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Bud Light is the cautionary tale in this.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Hi. Impressive carrying skills, right? I got some Bud Lights for us.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Bud Light is the ghost that haunts many a CMO's dreams.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: To refresh, as part of a campaign for the beer, they wound up enlisting a trans influencer by the name of Dylan Mulvaney.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: This month, I celebrated my Day 365 of womanhood, and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever, a can with my face on it.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: One of many influencers, by the way, this was not putting Dylan Mulvaney on a billboard in Times Square or buying a 30-spot Super Bowl with Dylan Mulvaney, and it was of many influencers who were engaged in this campaign.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And it was a tremendous backlash to that.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Kid Rock, among other sort of celebrities, took issue with the use of Mulvaney in this campaign.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Fuck Bud Light and fuck Anheuser-Busch. have a terrific day.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And it led to an enormous sales slide by one estimate could have possibly cost Bud Light a billion dollars.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And it was, I think, at that moment where brands had been already sort of backing away from being highly political in their advertising, that I think created even more caution, whereas brands had been more willing to be risky in terms of taking a stand around culture war issues, cultural identity issues a few years prior.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Does it ultimately matter what the brands say or do?
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Ultimately, these companies want us to buy their stuff.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Does it make a difference when they take a stand?
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I think that advertising is like many other types of media and pop culture.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: It reflects something about where we're at as a society during the floyd protest moment there was lots of patting on the back like advertisers patting themselves on the back for being brave being daring taking a stand not not being neutral right but like they were by and large noticing what was happening in the culture which is tens of thousands millions of people filling the streets as part of this protest moment, and they were taking their cue and taking their initiative from that.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: So in the sense that does it matter whether or not advertisers want to be political or brands want to take a stand on subjects of importance, I think it matters far less than what actual politicians feel about those issues.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: I think it matters far less than what everyday citizens think and feel about those issues because advertising doesn't lead, it reflects.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And in that sense, I think the reason that it matters is that it tells us something about where we're at in culture.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: Ads, of course, are just trying to sell you product. They're just trying to sell you soap or beer or jeans.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: But they're also telegraphing something about where consensus is in society.
--:-- Michael Serrazio: And the absence of political ads right now, I think, speaks to some reluctance on the part of society to engage with these issues that were so prominent four years ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Michael Serrazio, Boston College. He's a communications professor over there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His latest book is The Authenticity Industries, Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find it wherever you find your books.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Victoria Chamberlain produced our show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by David Herman and Andrea Kristinsdottir.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Vox is covering many more moments that changed or were supposed to change our country and our culture from self-care to the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan to a little podcast called Serial.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: cereal. Read all about him at Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Happy birthday, Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
