Why Coke went woke
Quin Hillyer
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Now I feel even better about my decision nearly two years ago to never drink or buy another Coca-Cola or, as far as I know, another Coke-owned product.
A new, quite believable Twitter feed about the beverage company makes it look even more like a cynical, race-baiting, dishonest bully than it already had appeared. About which, more in a moment.
First, I began my one-man Coke ban — not a “boycott,” because I didn’t agitate for others to join me — when Coke in early 2021 joined a number of other companies (several of which I also foreswore) in flat-out lying that the then-new voting law in Coke’s home state of Georgia would “make it harder for people to vote.” Rather than stand up for mild and reasonable efforts to protect the integrity of the balloting process, Coke joined the vicious rush to falsely portray the new law as a racially-motivated return to the era of Jim Crow. It helped poison national political discourse and probably harmed the economy of its home state.
It’s not that the Coca-Cola corporation cares much. I probably drank less than 100 Cokes per year anyway, so Coke’s loss of my business to RC Cola is a mere micro-drop in its ocean-sized bucket of income. Nonetheless, there is something to be said for individuals refusing to let their money support corporate misbehavior while hoping that tens of thousands of individuals do likewise.
Anyway, the new Twitter thread comes largely courtesy of one Calley Means, now a crusader against the overuse of sugar additives and, in general, in favor of healthier food choices. Among a series of Means’s damning claims against Coke, perhaps the most trenchant is one in which he wrote: “Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding. I say Coke’s policies are evil because I saw inside the room. The first step in playbook was paying the NACCP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist.”
And, Means wrote, it was quite explicit: “The conversations inside these rooms was depressingly transactional: ‘We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist.'”
There was more — lots more. Then, others citing this Twitter thread reminded us that Coke requires that its employees endure a “learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace.” Coke claims the “curriculum” merely provides “access” to a “LinkedIn Learning platform on a variety of topics, including diversity, equity, and inclusion.” A whistleblowing employee two years ago made it sound much more than haphazard access, but instead an essential part of Coke’s “required” training that tells employees to “try to be less white.”
Why? Because “to be less white is to be less” oppressive, arrogant, certain, and defensive, and “less ignorant,” too.
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What this is, is racism. Pure and simple. And, yes, evil. Even accepting Coke’s dubious excuse that it merely provides a “link” to the training rather than not making it a “part of the company’s learning curriculum,” it still takes a conscious choice by someone at Coke to deliberately provide a link to this racist rot.
Unlike its claims in 1970s TV ads, Coke isn’t the “real thing,” but apparently the racist thing. And I wouldn’t like to buy the world a Coke, but a healthy, non-Coke-owned iced tea instead. Because the more Coke goes woke, the more I hope it goes broke.