Target-ing Pride

[Music] The top song on iTunes chart.net today is Boycott Target by Mago Rapper 4G out of Blow, feet Nick Natoli and Stoney Dude Brode. Target has aggrieved some conservative activists because June is Pride Month and the company is selling Pride merchandise. A thing it has done in order to make money for years. So previous years have not been 2023, a year in which Anhyzer Bush's King of Beers light got in trouble with Kid Rock and Travis Tritt for partnering with Trans Influencer Dylan Mulvaney to sell beer. A year in which Lego, Coals and PetSmart are also facing Boycott calls over their sales of Pride-related merch, such as PetSmart's Pride Bikini for Dogs and the Rainbow Lamptop Toy. It's all coming up on today's plane. Support for today's plane comes from a talk eye atry. It's a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides evaluations, diagnoses and ongoing medication management for conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, so much more. Tokaiatry says it takes just a few minutes to get started. You complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your needs and schedule your first visit in days, not in months. Head to talkiatri.com/explained and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiatri.com/explained to get matched. Megan Rapino here. This week on A Touch More, we've got two insiders to help us unpack the WNBA's new CBA, three-time champion and WNBPA Vice President Alicia Clark, aka AC, and ESPN Basketball Analyst Andrea Carter. It's today explained I'm Noel King. This has been making money by selling pride merchandise for so many years that it's difficult to find answers to questions like which company was first, what year did they do it in. This is just something that's done and it's 2023 and it is not that controversial. But it's 2023. And so of course it's controversial. Vox's Emily Stewart has been covering target and bud light, two companies that conservative activists have targeted recently. Emily, can you start with target? So a lot of the controversy really appeared to center around misinformation and a rumor that target was selling Tuck-friendly bathing suits to children. So I found an extra small swan suit in the child section. Says light binding effect on it. And then the bottoms in the kids section, keep in mind, say Tuck-friendly construction. They're giving it to your kids. This was not happening. These Tuck-friendly bathing suits were on sale in adult sizes. They were not being marketed for children. But as with so many things on the internet, the rumors started, rumor took off and that had people really worked out. What is a Tuck-friendly bathing suit? It's basically a bathing suit. So if you are a trans woman, it would help you kind of conceal your genitalia and offer more coverage. Okay, so retail giant target, headquartered in Minnesota, is just, is not going to sell Tuck-friendly kids bathing suits. I'm sorry, that's just not a thing that would happen. How did a rumor like that get started? People are really kind of on the hunt for something to be mad about specifically around trans issues. It doesn't take long for these things to take off, like even before the calls for a boycott around target started. Like I started to see this rumor show up in my Twitter feed, right? Because it's somebody takes a picture and says, oh, you know, here is this Tuck-friendly bathing suit that I found in the target children section being marketed to kids. And that's really how this kind of took off. But there's one picture, there's a couple pictures going around and then people start to believe it. And I think the political context this year is quite different. You know, we've seen really a raft of anti-trans legislation across the country in many states. Laws covering everything from sports to education to healthcare access. So you're seeing bills that are being proposed or passed that would require teachers to outstuidance to their parents, bills that would prevent doctors from giving hormone therapy to trans youth, legislation that would prevent trans youth from being on sports teams that align with their gender identity. So these- And to be clear, they're fired up about the T, the trans issues. For a hint of what was going to happen here, we could go back to early April when there was a freak out over Bud Light. Can you remind me what happened there? So at the beginning of April, Bud Light sent a handful of cans of beer to a trans influencer named Dylan Mulvaney. As part of a pretty run of the mill marketing campaign. This month I celebrated my day 365 womanhood and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever, a can with my face on it. Check out my Instagram story to see how you can enjoy March Madness with Bud Light and maybe win some money too. Love ya! Cheers! Go team, whatever team you love, I love too. Okay. That being said, this really, really picked up traction on the right. There was a huge amount of backlash with, you know, I remember back to April. Hit a rock, shot, a bunch of cases of Bud Light. Let me say something to all you would be as clear and concise as possible. The country singer named Travis Tritz said he was dropping Bud Light from his tour writer. And there was a lot of backlash and there were calls for a boycott and it really, really, really took off, you know. I think that even I think back to early April, I kind of thought most boycods don't really work. There is still a lot of anger at Bud Light. They have seen a dip in sales. How long this will last? Who knows? And it has hurt the company and, you know, the company didn't handle it super well either. They didn't really stick to their guns. They got a little bit nervous, started putting out statements saying that they love America. And so at this point, everybody's mad at Bud Light, right? Like the rights man at Bud Light. And so are progressives who think that they kind of didn't stand up for their values. When bigots are loudly announcing they don't like your beer because they are bigots, that is not the opportunity for you to say that our beer is not for you. The company took quite a bit of a hit and they are a little bit nervous. And so I think a lot of companies are probably a little bit nervous. The Bud Light thing was kind of a win for activists. The company didn't handle it well. It appeared to waffle. It ended up with two executives being either sideline or taking some time off. So it seems like the dust up over Bud Light and the way in which the company handled it led to a group of activists, conservative activists looking for more targets and then they found one. In target. In target. Yes. So obviously that pun. But yeah, basically target every year has a ton of pride merchandise as too many retailers and they started to roll out their pride merchandise in May. And the right was on the hunt for another corporation to go after. I think seeing some of these activists seeing the success that they had with Bud Light, they thought, well, we can probably do this again. Who is the they here? I think you do see some people online, big voices on conservative Twitter and videos or whatever. But there are also customers showing up at target stores and making a mess earlier today. I was watching a video of a man who walked into a target store filming himself and started to destroy some of the pride merchandise and some of the signage. There was another video of someone who got into target and was filming employees and kind of harassing them. Hey, do you guys support the satanic pride propaganda? I provide both. You support it? You support it? You support it? What's God going to think of that? I don't believe in God. Wow. Do you need help with something? You support them. And so some of it is loud figures on the right, but some of it's customers that are showing up and harassing the stores and harassing the workers. How does target react? Like, what does the company say publicly? So on May 24th, target put out a statement saying that it would remove some items from its annual pride collection after it had experienced threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and the well-being while it work. They haven't been super open about what they are pulling and a lot of it has been them saying they're going to review what to leave out. I imagine it's store by store, but they're taking a look at it. And like I said, it's not like pride. It's gone from target and plenty of stores. This stuff is on display. It's certainly being probably featured on their website. But they're scaling back a little bit. How big a deal is pride for target? I have not been in a target for a long time. I just don't live near one. And I'm wondering, once you're in the store, is the pride stuff right at the front? Or do you have to go to the back where they keep the wrapping paper during Christmas? Is it a point of pride, the pride merch? I had a source going to a target last week to check stuff out. She said, you know, there really is pride stuff all over there. There are shirts, there are tote bags, there are tarot cards. I mean, it's also featured pretty prominently on the website. And I do think it's important to point out that pretty recently Target CEO, Brian Cornell, said on a podcast. - When your team's, your leadership represents the consumer you serve, I think good things happen. So I can see the benefits for our shareholders. I know that focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fueled much of our growth over the last nine years. - Target hasn't really been hiding that they pull out this kind of merchandise and that they want to sell to the demographic and that, you know, they want to sell rainbow stuff. Do they cancel pride entirely or is it just, we're pulling X, Y, and Z. Target's sell is doing pride. But they are pulling certain items. The retailer removing LGBTQ brand app Rowland from their stores and website whose products featured satanic themes. Target also reportedly reviewing its adult collection of tuck friendly swimsuits that allows trans people who have not had gender affirming operations to conceal their private parts. - And in the South, you know, there has been reporting that some of the stores have moved some of the pride merchandise to the back so it's not as prominently featured. You know, conservatives almost seem surprised that corporate pride is upon us once again. - That was Vox's Emily Stewart coming up after the break. Think about it for a moment. Is it weird that we expect corporations to take positions on social issues as opposed to just selling us stuff and making money? That's a hit. (soft music) - Support for the show comes from talk dietary. For a lot of people, getting help with mental health begins and ends with talk therapy. But if you find that you're still struggling to manage symptoms of anxiety, depression, or ADHD, it might be time to meet with the psychiatrist. And talk dietary wants to make that as simple as possible. Talk dietary is a 100% online psychology practice that says that they can provide comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more. Unlike therapy only apps, talk dietary is psychiatry. That means you're seeing a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication when it's appropriate. You'll also be able to meet with experienced, licensed psychiatrists who takes the time to understand what's going on and builds a personalized treatment plan head to talkiatrie.com/explain to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiatrie.com/explain to get matched in minutes. - Support for today's plane comes from bombas, perhaps you wanna get in shape this year. Bombas wants to tell you about the all-new bombas sports socks engineered with sport-specific comfort for running, golf, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, and all-sport. Meanwhile, for the lounges among us, bombas has non-sport footwear available. But bombas doesn't just offer sport and non-sport socks. 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I'm a senior editor at the Hedgehog Review, which is a quarterly journal of ideas and cultural analysis at the University of Virginia. And I'm a historian. - And you have a book coming out? - I do, yeah, it's called "Taming the Octopus, the Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation," which is a history of big business in the 20th century that's coming out early next year. So I'm wrapping up copy edits and that kind of thing. - Let's see tomorrow or next month, target does something wild or bud light does something wild. Do you have to make frantic edits? - I see what you mean. No, I mean, I think that the dynamics, then this is a very much a historian kind of way approaching the headlines, is the dynamics that we're seeing play out are old dynamics. I think they're intensifying. I think there are things that are new about the environment that we're in right now. But the question that I'm asking in the book, and then I think the question that's kind of underlying all of these controversies is the question of, what is the corporation? What is it good for? What is its purpose? And those are, it turns out very old questions that Americans have been wrestling with from generation to generation, I think. All right, so let's start here today. Target CEO just about two weeks ago did an interview on a podcast. And he's kind of boasting to the podcast host that target really focuses on diversity and inclusion. And in fact, target has made money because it focuses on diversity and inclusion. And then about seven days later, Target says, oh, we're pulling some pride related merchandise. We're not gonna be so into diversity that we're unwilling to back down if we get some pushback from conservative activists. Your historian, is there precedent for this kind of behavior by big company? - I think that this kind of thing happens from time to time where a business will have to respond to its changing social and political environment and makes a judgment that it's going to offer products that are reflective of the changing cultural and social moment and then having to back down or respond to criticism. I think what is really new in this moment though is that the conservative movement in the United States is changing. The way the conservatives in the past have responded to big business being more welcoming and opening progressive causes was to say, just focus on profits, stick to business, stay in your lane. And I think that we're saying a dynamic where that's changing quite a bit. Now there are seeds to this response to target in the conservative movement. I think especially of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States launched a boycott of Disney in 1997 over the company's decision to provide health insurance benefits to same-sex couples. - Disney is not the Disney, we knew in our childhood Disney is not the same company. They've made some changes and they have not been for the best. - That boycott was incredibly not successful, which is why almost no one remembers it. In that moment, the conservative Baptist occupied a very minority position within the conservative movement. But now I think we're seeing a moment in which those kinds of ways of responding to big business are reaching into the mainstream of the conservative movement. Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida, using his position within the movement to make big demands on big corporations, to reject what they're calling woke capitalism. - Now I think you're seeing this change within the movement where conservatives look at companies like a Chick-fil-A or a hobby-lotic corporation. And they're praising them not just for the profits that they make or the productivity margins that they have, but that they represent conservative cultural identities. - When did Americans start expecting more from companies than that companies would just sell them stuff? Ever since the rise of corporate capitalism in the early 20th century, corporations have been doing their best to overcome the perception that they are a nameless, faceless bureaucracy that they're just focused on making a buck. And the way that they've done that from the early 20th century, companies like Journal Electric and AT&T used advertisements, they used spokespersons with only personalities and art that reflected a kind of humanness that they gave money to charities and they paid for public works and they contributed to communities to show that they had a personality, that they have a corporate soul. When compared to the way that business had been done in the United States before then, corporations were shockingly abstract and they seemed dangerously powerful. And so Americans have always had something of a love-hate relationship with big business. We support. it and desire it for what it can do for us, for its productivity, for its efficiency. But I think we're also a bit suspicious and sometimes intensely worried about the power that large corporations exercise. They have immense privileges and rights that allow them to become big and powerful. And these legal and economic powers are given to corporations by states and they're inscribed in law. But we often don't really have as much of a clear idea about what social responsibilities they should have. And so I think what we're seeing here is an intensification of that fight over what big business really is for besides making money. When did companies themselves begin to be aligned with the kind of inclusion that we think of a lot of companies as expressing today or as being aligned with today? In order to understand the relationship that corporations have with progressive movements, you really have to go back to the post-war era to the rise of the civil rights movement. And the way that activists started to see that the object of their activism should not focus simply on Washington or on state legislatures and on law and public policy, but on big business strategy. And the way that this played out was that activists James Peck and Barrett Rustin are examples of civil rights activists in the 1950s that bought shares of the Greyhound bus company and demanded that they desegregate their bus lines. Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies. And we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn. They wanted to put shareholder resolutions to the floor of the shareholder meeting and demand that they make changes. Vowsky's tactics got adopted in the wider civil rights movement in the early 1970s. Stoughton Linde, who I quote in my book, who says, he said, "Why do we continue to demonstrate in Washington as if the core of the problem lay there?" And he encouraged fellow activists to lay siege to corporations as he put it. And so activists would buy up shares and they would go to the annual meetings of General Electric in 1971 and demand that they end discrimination practices in the workplace and demand that they have representation in card dealerships and demand that they mitigate the pollution that they've caused. Civil rights, environmentalism, these are progressive causes. These are lefty issues, we might say. Not carrying pride merchandise is a conservative issue. It's a conservative cause. Does this mean the politics of the people doing the protesting have changed over time? And in fact, maybe even changed us in the last year or two years? I wouldn't say what's happened is that the protests have changed. I think that we still see protests and activist movements and social movements and people calling on big business to support progressive causes. But I think what we're seeing and what's new is this change in the conservative movement where conservatives aren't calling on big business as much simply to focus on profits. Now, I think that's still there. That's still in the milieu, that's still a part of the movement. But what we're seeing is more of a vocal minority within the conservative movement that's saying what we want is corporations to take on and to represent conservative cultural identities. What are you saying? And I think what I've experienced in my lifetime, as somebody who became a consumer in the 90s. I understand the definition of corporate responsibility as it has existed to this point from the progressive point of view. You don't pollute the river. You don't cut down the rainforest. You make sure that you are hiring people from diverse backgrounds. When I hear corporate responsibility, that's where my brain goes. What is the definition of corporate responsibility for conservatives? What are we seeing? Conservatives haven't yet quite figured that out. In some ways, I think that they're caught between a shareholder value, just focus on profits, just focus on business kind of response. And something else, it's not quite articulated yet. And it's articulated as far as I've been able to see in being very critical of woke capitalism or, as they call it, or ESG or DEI. The Texas House passed Senate Bill 17 to prevent public colleges and universities in the state from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or policies. I think that's one of the rhetorical problems that the cultural conservative movement is facing right now. What is the positive vision that they have for big business? And one response might be that they don't want businesses to be that big. I'm sort of speculating, but I think that conservatives would say that they're standing for something that's very important, that they are articulating something that is positive. But the way that it's worked out within the culture war in the last few years, it's been mostly activated in a negative way towards these controversial issues that have been coming up. I see the moment that we're in is one where people are sorting out their political, economic, and personal identities. We live in a moment of hyper-politics where social psychologists and political scientists can tell you that the kind of beer that you drink, the place that you shop is actually a pretty good predictor of how you're going to vote. And people see more and more their economic lives being an expression of their political identity. The mantra of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 70s was that the person was political. And I think what we're seeing now is that it's not just that the personal is political, but the economic is political, and the economic is also personal. And those dynamics are playing out in the left and the right. And I think that's going to pose significant problems for executives and other big business leaders. Because what it means is that there's not an easy way out of these intense conflicts, these corporate culture wars. Kyle Williams, he's a historian and editor of the Hedgehog Review at UVA. Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and edited by Matthew Colette. It was fact checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Michael Rayfield. Welcome to our new executive producer Miranda Kennedy. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. [Music]