11: Richard Gear* on ‘Selling Social Justice: Why The Rich Love Antiracism’ by Jennifer C. Pan
On a snowy Michigan winter day in January 2026, I found myself glued to my iPhone, watching videos of ICE agents in full tactical gear attacking civilians in Minneapolis. I wasn’t alone. Much of the American and global public witnessed what unfolded. It felt like another moment of reckoning: one in a long sequence that has made increasingly clear how the state governs through brute-force policing, ultranationalism, and racialized exclusion. Certain lives—immigrants, people of color, and those who stand in solidarity with them—remain disposable. “Make America Great Again” at the cost of innocent lives: Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed within the span of two weeks. Both Americans.
The feeling was familiar. I looked up from my phone and noticed my neighbor’s faded BLACK LIVES MATTER yard sign in a neighborhood that is nearly all white. It took me back to the summer of 2020, when expressions of solidarity proliferated: donations to bail funds, mutual aid campaigns, and emergency support for strangers online. There was genuine care in many of these gestures, but also a kind of moral urgency untethered from long-term structural change. As attention moved on, the conditions that produced that moment remained largely intact.
In the years since, it has become harder to ignore how parts of the non-profit and philanthropic ecosystem, including some high-profile 501(c)(3) organizations, arts, and cultural institutions, absorbed unprecedented resources with limited accountability or durable impact. What was framed as racial justice often settled into HR policies, branding strategies, and symbolic wins, rather than material redistribution or systemic transformation. In the art world, the language and aesthetics of justice and solidarity endured, even as their political force thinned.
Jennifer C. Pan’s book Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism offers an unexpected critique of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). It is not the predictable right-wing dismissal of progressive education or the recognition of marginalized people, but a staunchly left critique of how the language and practice of equity and anti-racism in the United States have been commodified. She points out that DEI was not actually born out of the social justice movement. From its inception around the time of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, it has served the ruling class as a professionalized, market-friendly language that ultimately stabilizes an exploitative economic order. In this formulation, racial awareness becomes a consumable moral performance, one that often obscures class inequality rather than confronting it. Representation (of traditionally marginalized community members) expands, while the underlying distribution of power remains unchanged.
This critique resonates strongly within the art world. The post-2020 surge of institutional attention toward BIPOC artists often mirrored corporate diversity strategies: an emphasis on visibility without a corresponding shift in control, resources, or decision-making power. We’ve witnessed many more BIPOC artists exhibiting in major art museums in America. First, that fact on its own should be celebrated. Second, we should review them clearly. Some exhibitions were genuinely thoughtful and rigorous. Others flattened radical content into digestible forms, fitting it neatly within the white cube. Cynics and critics have called out such “Painted Protests” as disingenuous, while philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò describes, through the concept of elite capture, how opportunities increasingly flowed to those within marginalized groups who were already positioned to benefit, without translating into broader structural change.
Pan is neither cynical nor hopeless. I found her book to be charged with a brilliant energy of optimism and a call to action. It is a redirection of political imagination away from symbolic inclusion and toward the construction of an economic order that serves the majority, regardless of race. Justice, she insists, cannot be achieved solely by diversifying who benefits from capitalism.
The racial reckoning of 2020 gave us more diverse museum exhibitions within an increasingly authoritarian state. What we witness in moments like Minneapolis is not an aberration, but a visible expression of fascistic violence against immigrants and marginalized people living what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” For artists, institutions, and communities, the challenge now is not to abandon solidarity, but to rethink it. This means moving beyond attention economies, performative gestures, cancel culture, and activism as personal branding toward forms of creative action that are quieter, less legible, and materially grounded, rooted in sustaining dignified life rather than managing its representation. Artists, regardless of their identities, will be a critical part of making this shift.
– Richard*, February 2026
Richard Gear* is an art historian in training based in Michigan. He is preparing for doctoral study in art history, with an intended focus on contemporary art, technology and the built environment. His research interests center on post-2001 artistic practices, particularly questions of authorship, institutional frameworks, and the circulation of images within global and technologically mediated contexts. Gear’s academic work engages interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from critical theory, cultural studies, and science and technology studies (STS). He is especially interested in how contemporary artists respond to shifting technological, political, and social conditions, and how these responses challenge and reshape established art historical narratives. His current research explores socially engaged practices in contemporary art, with attention to how meaning is produced through audience participation, pedagogy, and collaborative models of production.
He has received training in studio art alongside coursework in modern and contemporary art history, and has sustained engagement with global biennales and nonprofit art organizations. He splits time between Michigan and New York, his research and writing are often shaped by long winters, extended time in libraries, and the rhythms of a college town organized around walking, reading, and watching the weather change. His scholarly interests are further informed by a commitment to social justice and the role of art in public and civic life.
*Pseudonym.
