Diversity Cola? To Be Less White, Coca-Cola Must Change Its Name
[Buck Throckmorton]

Bravo to the Coca Cola Company for being bold enough to accuse every single one its white employees of being racist. It’s about time a major company had the guts to do so. According to the training that Coke compelled its employees to take, simply being white at the age of 4 means that you will be a racist for life. And best of all, white Coca Cola employees have been instructed to “Try to be less white.”

And though it’s important that Coke also mount an advertising campaign to similarly accuse its white customers of being racist too, it has a more immediate problem – the name Coca Cola is dripping with racism and white privilege, and it must be changed immediately. So, as much as I applaud Coke’s efforts to shame its white employees and customers for the hate-crime of being born white, every person who opposes racism must boycott Coca Cola until it changes its name.

Coca Cola was created by John Pemberton, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War who once owned slaves. He named the product, and therefore the name “Coca Cola” is forever smeared with the legacy of slavery and the Confederacy. Mr. Pemberton died in 1888, but his creation has lived on with the same name for another 130+ years.

When was the best time for The Coca Cola Company to change the name given to it by a slave-owning Confederate? That would have been in 1888. The next best time is now.

In the past year Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Jemima have changed their names, and even Sambo’s finally broke down and did the same. If Sambo’s can become Chad’s, and the Quaker Oats company can change the name Aunt Jemima to Pearl’s Milling Company, then surely Coca Cola can find some benign new name like Diversity Cola, right?

James Quincey is both the CEO and Chairman of the Board of The Coca Cola Company. Every shareholder – heck, every American who hates racism - is entitled to ask him why he is hanging on to the company’s white supremacist name, instead of following the bold leadership of companies like Quaker Oats.

While at it, we need to know what actions Mr. Quincey is taking to be less white. The same goes for every white executive and Board member at Coca Cola. By the way, if you look at the uppermost echelon of executives at The Coca Cola Company, they are whiter than a Whole Foods in Vermont. Yet they are making others confess their racism? Projection much?

So, I will be boycotting Coke products, but I will also buy one share of Coca Cola stock. As an owner I will demand that Coca Cola change its racist name, and demand that every executive and Board member tell me - an owner of the company - what they are personally doing to be less white.

(buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com)

posted by Open Blogger at 03:31 PM

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