In an attempt to respond to a volcanic eruption of discourse around systemic racism and police brutality, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce masqueraded in a modern version of blackface.

Roughly a month after the murder of George Floyd last year, the nation’s leading business lobby held a national town hall on inequality with marquee names such as basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, television host Gayle King, and Howard University President Wayne Frederick. A couple weeks later, in an op-ed, Chamber President Suzanne Clark pledged to put the “collective muscle of American business behind an urgent nationwide push for equality of opportunity.”

The muscle came nowhere close to where the lobby’s mouth was.

As I wrote last summer, the town hall was a cruel mockery, especially as viewed through the lens of the health of Black and brown communities nationwide – and the Chamber’s contributions to that plight. After all, the chamber’s top known funders have included megapolluters Chevron and Dow. And it had opposed most climate change and environmental measures enacted by the Obama administration, cheered on most of the rollbacks of the Trump administration, and supported a host of environmentally regressive Republican senatorial candidates in their elections or reelections.

Since the Biden administration began, the chamber has only doubled down on backing policies that impede the fight against climate change, abetting companies whose activities imprison people of color in clouds of fossil fuel pollution. Many of the same politicians the Chamber backed in 2020 also happen to be pushing for voting rights restrictions that experts say will primarily suppress the voices of people of color – hardly a step toward the equality Clark promised to fight for.

Read the full article about the US chamber of commerce's faux social justice platform by Derrick Z. Jackson at Grist.