Corporate Personhood and the Appropriation of Racialized Discourse

This chapter advances the argument that corporations have racial responsibilities. It focuses on how corporations appropriate discourse, intended to foster racial equality, for their own gain. The chapter first examines how corporations appropriated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The law was intended to protect the personhood of newly freed Black people, but corporations used it to achieve a more powerful form of corporate personhood. Then the chapter directs attention to a second example of the corporate appropriation of a racialized discourse, and it examines a 2017 Pepsi commercial starring Kendall Jenner. Both examples illustrate ways that corporations can leverage racialized discourse to advance their own aims without sufficient regard for those whom the discourse was intended to serve and protect.