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Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest Editors’ Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2024

Michael J. Thate  and
Tyesha Maddox
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Extract

The year 2020 set into motion a perfect storm that would lead to the global panic ignited by the murder of George Floyd in late May of that year. The COVID-19 virus impacted billions of people around the world. With many forced to shelter in place at home, some Americans for the first time (and an exhaustingly innumerable time for others) observed up close the inequality apparent in American policing. On average, Black Americans are 2.9 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police, with very few officers held accountable and prosecuted for these deaths.1 One cannot make sense of this special section on Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest without an examination of this fact and the events leading up to Floyd’s murder. Statistically speaking, however, the year 2020 did not signal anything unusual. In that year, according to Statistica.com, U.S. police killed 1,020 people. Fatalities had been rising steadily from 981 in 2017 to 983 in 2018 and 999 in 2019. 2 It is not immediately apparent how best to interpret these numbers. What justifies police use of deadly force, and in turn, what is an acceptable rate of police killings per year? Or is this even a productive line of thought? The effectiveness of police power in the United States has been a standing debate since the foundations of American government.3 And the nature of inequality marked by race within policing has been demonstrated countless times in the literature.4 Reforming the phenomenon of “policing” in the United States, however, though simple to call for, is complicated to enact—not least owing to the “blue wall of silence” that protects police officers from the consequences of misconduct and the near-term spikes in crime and expenses that the very communities who are most disadvantaged by current policing practices are forced to bear.

Type
Introduction
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 2024 , pp. 308 - 312
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Business History Conference

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References

1. “Mapping Police Violence,” accessed 17 September 2023; https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/?utm_campaign=launch&utm_source=google&utm_medium=ad&utm_term=mapping%20police%20violence&gclid=CjwKCAjwjaWoBhAmEiwAXz8DBc8lkO-Hkngc6I6mTK9ML_TEib5Ega1y-MbXiY0YhLw_YimyKy7qQRoC-jMQAvD_BwE.

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/, accessed 15 June 2023.

3. See, for example, Dubber, Markus Dirk, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Carbado, Devon W., Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, New York: The New Press, 2022 Google Scholar.

5. See Schanzenbach, Max, “Policing the Police: Personnel Management and Police Misconduct,” Vanderbilt Law Review 75.5 (2022): 1523–1577 Google Scholar.

6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/george-floyd-corporate-america-racial-justice/, accessed 17 June 2023.

7. https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-commitments/sustainability/one-million-black-women/, accessed 18 June 2023.

8. The literature on the doctrine is vast. See, for example, Hayden, Grant M. and Bodie, Matthew T., Reconstructing the Corporation: From Shareholder Primacy to Shared Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. See M. Todd Henderson, “Everything Is New Again: Lessons from Dodge v. Ford Motor Company,” University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 373 (December 2007): 1–39. See, too, Roe, Mark J., “ Dodge v. Ford: What Happened and Why?” Vanderbilt Law Review 74.6 (2021): 1755–1785 Google Scholar; Bainbridge, Stephen M., “Why We Should Keep Teaching Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.,” The Journal of Corporation Law 48.1 (2022): 77–119 Google Scholar; Rhee, Robert J., “The Neoliberal Corporate Purpose of Dodge v. Ford and Shareholder Primacy: A Historical Context 1919–2019,” Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance 28.1 (2023): 202–254 Google Scholar.

10. N = 32,000 from 28 different countries // 1,150 +/- respondents per country. See https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2023-03/2023%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report%20FINAL.pdf, accessed 27 April 2023.

11. See, for example, Marquis, Christopher, Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020 Google Scholar.

12. See, for example, https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/what-corporate-philanthropy-got-wrong-after-george-floyds-murder, accessed 18 June 2023.