This article originally appeared in The
Nation.
"Wal-Mart is working for everyone," read the newspaper
ad, which ran in January in more than 100 newspapers nationwide,
including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
"Some of our critics are working only for themselves."
The same day, the company launched walmartfacts.com,
a website to counter criticism of the kind you may have read in
this magazine. Along with some misleading information intended
to make Wal-Mart's wages and benefits sound much better than they
are, the new campaign materials feature many smiling African-American
faces; the website explains, accurately, that Wal-Mart is a "leading
employer" of Hispanics and African-Americans.
As Jesse Jackson and other black leaders have pointed out in
response to this boast, the slave plantation was once a "leading
employer" of African-Americans as well. But this ad campaign
was only the latest salvo in Wal-Mart's fervent battle for the
goodwill of black America, inspired by the difficulties the company
is having as it tries to move into urban areas.
Wal-Mart spent more than $1 million on a PR campaign backing
a voter referendum to build a Supercenter in Inglewood, California,
where the majority of voters are people of color, and was decisively
defeated last year. The company faces continued resistance in
Chicago as well, where it has been trying to open stores in black
neighborhoods. A Wal-Mart on that city's West Side is scheduled
to open by next February – to the frustration of those who opposed
it – while plans for a South Side store have been scuttled. Controversy
continues to rage about a Wal-Mart project in New Orleans, and
in late February plans for a New York City Wal-Mart were scrapped
in the wake of protests by labor, small business and neighborhood
groups. Much of the opposition to the retailer has been led by
activists of color. And, of course, since many people of color
are poor, Wal-Mart depends on them as shoppers and as workers.
It's no surprise, then, that the company would be eager to appeal
to racial minorities.
If you own a TV, you've probably seen what many of Wal-Mart's
critics call its "happy black people" ad, which has
been airing since 2003, when the Inglewood fight heated up. Filmed
at a Wal-Mart store in Crenshaw, a Los Angeles neighborhood, the
ad features smiling African-Americans giving glowing testimony
to what Wal-Mart has done for the "community." ("Community"
in Wal-Mart World often seems to mean "black" – on the
website, for instance, the word is illustrated not by a group
of people, as it's commonly understood to mean, but by one exuberant,
young woman of color, a beneficiary of a Wal-Mart scholarship.)
In another TV spot, a black woman who works for Wal-Mart raves
about the "opportunities" she's found working with the
company. As the writer Earl Ofari Hutchinson has observed, the
fact that black women are absent from most advertising imagery
potentially makes Wal-Mart's campaign that much more powerful.
The company also takes out ads in black newspapers, especially
in cities where it faces political opposition, and radio spots
during Sunday morning gospel hour. And Wal-Mart celebrates Black
History Month, distributing free booklets to consumers with inspirational
sayings from accomplished African-Americans.
Much like that of the Bush Administration, Wal-Mart's image-making
strategy includes not only advertising but paying for positive
media coverage from black journalists. This year the company will
begin awarding scholarships to minority journalism students at
Howard, Columbia and elsewhere – a worthy use of Wal-Mart's funds,
given that people of color are underrepresented in this profession,
but a rather transparent move to buy off potential critics. (In
an unusual twist, the recipients will attend Wal-Mart's annual
shareholders' meeting, a massive pep rally whose primary purpose
is to immerse attendees in the company culture.) The company knows
what favors its money can buy: Wal-Mart underwrites Tavis Smiley's
popular television talk show in Los Angeles, and Smiley returned
the favor last year when, during the heated battle in Inglewood,
he invited Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott on the air for a fawning interview,
taking no calls.
Wal-Mart even gives money to civil rights organizations fighting
racism – groups like La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense
Fund, the Urban League, the United Negro College Fund and the
NAACP. As with the journalism scholarships, this isn't all bad:
far better that Wal-Mart's money be used to fight for racial equality
than to elect Republicans or simply further enrich its own CEO,
who at nearly $23 million a year makes well over 1,000 times as
much as the average Wal-Mart worker. Unfortunately, however, taking
money from Wal-Mart may sometimes compromise organizations politically.
In Chicago, the NAACP chapter supported Wal-Mart in the political
battle over the South Side store; likewise, in a recent battle
over Wal-Mart in suburban Atlanta, Wal-Mart found the NAACP on
its side.
Indeed, the company has become a skillful grassroots player.
In both Inglewood and Chicago, Wal-Mart gave money to black churches,
community groups and politicians. Wal-Mart courted Emma Mitts,
an African-American alderwoman representing Chicago's West Side,
and found her easily seduced. Mitts became a strident advocate
for the retailer. Like many other organizations and individuals,
she wasn't much of an expense; according to campaign disclosure
documents filed with the State of Illinois, Wal-Mart rewarded
her efforts last November with $5,000. (Mitts did not return calls
for this article.)
Many black community activists were appalled that black leaders
were so easily bought off. "I was ashamed to be black!"
says Elce Redmond of the South Austin Coalition, a Chicago neighborhood
organization, describing how the clergy and elites rolled over.
"A lot of people have no principles. They will wear the dashiki,
but always take the green money from a multinational corporation."
Wal-Mart was deliberate, Redmond observes: "In almost twenty
years of organizing, I have never seen anything so divisive. If
you're going to take their money, take it, but don't pretend Wal-Mart
is good for the community." He's not posturing: Redmond's
South Austin Coalition received a check from Wal-Mart for a youth
center, cashed it and continued to work politically to oppose
the retailer.
But the organizing Wal-Mart representatives did, and the arguments
they made, may have been just as important as any cash they doled
out. They talked to ministers and community groups about the jobs
the company was going to bring, and the low prices. "It was
just smart," says Renaye Manley, the national field representative
in the AFL-CIO's Midwest office, which is based in Chicago. "And
it made our job that much harder." Manley, who is black and
from Chicago's South Side, thinks Wal-Mart's outreach was more
important than its money and that most community leaders were
not bought off but genuinely convinced: "People just wanted
to see jobs. These folks have a vision for their communities."
James Thindwa, a Zimbabwean who heads Chicago's Jobs
With Justice, says, "A lot of good, decent people bought
the argument that any job is better than none." Glen Ford
and Peter Gamble, writing for The
Black Commentator, had a harsher take on this "slavish"
acceptance of anything corporate America has on offer, chastising
Chicago's black politicians for failing "to address Black
community development as an issue of democracy."
Most destructively, Thindwa says – and other Chicago activists
agree – "Wal-Mart played the race card." The company
told the city's black leaders that the unions fighting the retailer
were racist, effectively exploiting existing racial tensions in
the city. As elsewhere, the building trades unions in Chicago
have historically discriminated against blacks. But it is service
unions like the Service Employees International that are speaking
out the most against Wal-Mart, and in cities, their membership
is mostly people of color. "[Wal-Mart] knew what buttons
to push," Redmond acknowledges, but he's outraged that so
many black leaders bought the simplistic line that all unions
are racist. "I've never seen so much ignorance. They had
no sense at all of the history of African-Americans in unions.
A. Philip Randolph, ever heard of him? So they're going to side
with the corporate enslaver, like, 'Wal-Mart will save us Negroes!'"
Thindwa says, "Wal-Mart was able to paint this as white
unions protecting their turf, instead of as a broad-based community
issue." Worse, activists now agree, the anti-Wal-Mart coalition
failed to respond effectively to the company's race-baiting. Dorian
Warren, an African-American community activist and member of the
Chicago Workers' Rights Board, says, "The media framed it
as 'white labor versus the black community.' We were not able
to change the frame."
There are clearly profound racial tensions in the labor movement,
and as Wal-Mart continues to move into cities it is likely to
continue to exploit these tensions. Warren, a public policy scholar
at the University of Chicago, says, "I've been at a loss
to figure out why the labor movement can't have an honest conversation
about race." Contributing to the problem, black-led labor
activism has declined in recent decades, and many mainstream unions
aren't training black leaders (which is closely related to their
failure to develop leaders from the rank and file of any race).
There's a sense – in these battles over Wal-Mart, as in many other
situations – that labor uses communities of color when it's convenient
but drops them when a particular campaign is over. That's easily
exploited since, as Warren puts it, "there's just enough
truth to it."
Of course, there's still plenty of skepticism among African-Americans
about Wal-Mart.
Indeed, some black clergy were leaders in the fight against Wal-Mart
in Chicago. Community opposition probably did contribute to the
retailer's defeat on the South Side and may help the coalition's
attempts to pass an ordinance requiring Wal-Mart to pay a living
wage to workers on the West Side. In Inglewood, the fight against
Wal-Mart was led by black and Latino church and community activists,
and very few leaders were bought off. Blacks there did not buy
the line that Wal-Mart was antiracist and the unions – therefore,
all of Wal-Mart's opponents – were racist. That's partly because
in Inglewood relations between the United Food and Commercial
Workers and the community groups were much better. Whereas in
Chicago the union often insisted on having its white and male
leadership speak at public events, in Inglewood black women who
lived in the town and worked in supermarkets were prominent faces
in Wal-Mart's public opposition; they knocked on doors and talked
to their fellow citizens about why their unionized grocery job
was so important to them and their families, and why Wal-Mart
was such a threat.
Madeline Janis-Aparicio of the Coalition for a Better Inglewood
says about her campaign's success: "We were also lucky –
Wal-Mart did something really stupid." In trying to pass
an ordinance exempting itself from the town's laws, the company
violated the largely black community's most basic requirement:
respect. "We used that," says Janis-Aparicio, who credits
that theme with winning over the church leadership and many Inglewood
voters. After one large, mainstream black church joined the anti-Wal-Mart
fight, the rest followed, not just lending passive endorsement
but enthusiastically rallying their forces. Another helpful issue
was crime – Wal-Mart is the nation's leading purveyor of guns.
To rural white communities, that's often a political asset, but
to urban black voters it's a harsh liability. In the last few
days of the Inglewood campaign, the anti-Wal-Mart coalition hung
a flier in the shape of an M-16 rifle on everybody's door. "Some
on our side felt it was a scare tactic," Janis-Aparicio admits,
but, she adds with justified pride, "it had a powerful impact."
Even in Chicago, Wal-Mart's own actions may end up helping its
opponents. Elce Redmond says, "A lot of people who supported
Wal-Mart at first are now saying, 'Elce, you were right.' Wal-Mart
made a lot of promises, and hasn't delivered." Politicians
and community leaders are now finding that since Wal-Mart secured
permission to open the West Side store, its officials aren't returning
their calls too readily. Rather than agreeing to pay workers decently,
the company sent 300 holiday turkeys for the community's needy.
That struck many people as a shallow response to concerns about
the store's economic impact. "People are beginning to ask
questions," says Redmond. "Why can't Wal-Mart pay a
living wage? Why can't its workers have a union if they want one?
Why not?"
This article was reprinted with permission from the March
28, 2005 issue of The Nation (www.thenation.com).
Ms. Featherstone is the author of Selling
Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart
(Basic).