DISPATCHES FROM THE LULULEMON RIOTS: The gentrification of revolt — liberals distract from real change in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. “The most selfish generation isn’t doing this for Black Lives. They are doing it for Instagram.”

Hollow gestures of corporate solidarity are meant to appease everyone apart from the people living with the every day stigma of police profiling, who couldn’t care less. Nobody asked to remove old episodes of the Golden Girls over mud masks or for white actors to give up their work voicing black characters. But the companies know that if the media and politicians will use a a private citizen in Central Park’s confrontation with a bird watcher as a symbol of systemic racism to distract from their disastrous decades of policies, then they will surely come after a corporate brand of rice or syrup.

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Renaming a plaza in Washington DC or painting giant yellow letters down 5th Avenue in New York outside Trump Tower is the perfect kind of shiny object for the media to focus on. Just keep ignoring the Democrat politicians who have failed these communities over and over again.

Earlier: The neoliberal counter-revolution. “Does anyone seriously believe the American establishment — Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, the trustees of Ivy League universities, the major sports leagues, even Brooks Brothers, for God’s sake — would sign on to a movement that genuinely threatened its material interests?”