Ben and Jerry’s have officially requested and made the public plea to Americans to “dismantle white supremacy” and “grapple with the sins of our past”, joining the ranks of corporations taking sides with the Blakc Lives Matter movement.
In a statement posted on the company’s official website, the ice cream maker known for their social involvements in the past have defined the George Floyd police brutality case as an “inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy.
What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning,” said the statement. The statement from Ben & Jerry’s has been praised for its “unusually comprehensive and direct, addressing the historical roots of discrimination in the United States and calling out systemic racism, while advocating specific policies to prevent further police abuses and redress racial inequality” by the media.
Accordingly the following statement could be found in the statement as well:
“Slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were systems of legalized and monetized white supremacy for which generations of Black and Brown people paid an immeasurable price. That cost must be acknowledged and the privilege that accrued to some at the expense of others must be reckoned with and redressed.”
Ben & Jerry’s, which also publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement, called on President Donald Trump to disavow white supremacists and nationalist groups that “overtly support him.
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The ice cream maker also called for the US Department of Justice to reinvigorate its Civil Rights Division, and for Congress to pass H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to study the effects of discrimination since African slaves first arrived in North America in 1619 and recommend remedies.
Ben & Jerry’s has a long history of political activism under founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who were arrested in 2016 for protesting against money in politics.
“We’re a wholly owned subsidiary [of Unilever], but we still act according to Ben & Jerry’s mission, vision and values,” a spokesperson said in an intervie. The brand has even used its ice cream to lobby for change, launching the Justice ReMix’d flavor in September to promote criminal justice reform and Pecan Resist in 2018 to protest Trump administration policies it described as “regressive and discriminatory.
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