CONCLUSION
We Are More Than
WHO IS THE GREATEST BASKETBALL PLAYER of all time? Among basketball fans, this question generates a ton of debate. More often than not, the debate has converged on two names: Michael Jordan and LeBron James.
The case for Jordan is straightforward and strong. Six-time NBA champion. Six NBA Finals MVP awards. Five league-wide MVP awards. Ten-time scoring champion. One Defensive Player of the Year Award. Countless gravity-defying moves and clutch baskets. To say nothing of the iconic sneakers and how he fundamentally revolutionized the game from one about big men to one about small guards who could fly.
The case for LeBron James is just as straightforward and strong. Four NBA championships with three different teams. Four-time NBA Finals MVP. Four league-wide MVP awards. One-time scoring champion. One-time assist leader. To say nothing of how he built on Jordan’s legacy and revolutionized the definition of a basketball superstar during an era when the game and its players became faster and more skilled than ever. At the time of this writing and the end of the 2020-2021 NBA season, James continued to play basketball at the highest level at the age of thirty-six, an age where most players have retired or been relegated to a supporting role.
In terms of business, Jordan and James are both incredibly successful capitalists. Jordan is a billionaire and the principal owner of the NBA Charlotte Hornets. His Jordan Brand under Nike is worth an estimated $10 billion.1 He also has a variety of business interests and endorsements worth millions of dollars. Jordan during his playing days was arguably the most famous person in the world, and a favorite brand ambassador of corporate America.
James has an estimated net worth of $275 million and growing.2 In addition to being one of the highest-paid athletes in the world, James is an astute investor and entrepreneur. James and his partners own LRMR, a sports-marketing company, as well as SpringHill Entertainment, which produces movies and television shows.
Where these two basketball icons diverge is in their approaches to activism, especially during their playing days. Jordan largely avoided commenting on controversial, social issues during his career. James, in contrast, has used his platform to be an outspoken agent of social change. To lift up young children in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, James and his family foundation started the I Promise School. Using his business prowess, James also partnered with the University of Akron and JPMorgan Chase to provide free tuition to the university for every qualified graduate of an Akron public high school. During the unrest and protests that followed the killings of unarmed Black men and women like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, James spoke out and demonstrated with his teammates. During the Trump presidency, James often spoke out against the president’s actions and policies.
In 2020, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Milwaukee, James led NBA players in discussions with the league and owners to act on racial justice. The discussions resulted in immediate donations to numerous civil rights organizations, a public campaign to raise racial justice awareness, and the formation of foundations and task forces to address the issue within the league and beyond. Most significantly, James and his peers convinced team owners to convert their arenas to be used as polling sites for the 2020 election. James also formed the More Than a Vote initiative to register and get millions of people to the polls for the 2020 election. This made it much easier for millions of Americans to vote and turn out in numbers unseen in decades, and in the middle of a pandemic.
While James’s efforts brought him much acclaim, they also brought him scorn and criticism. At one point, then president Trump even publicly admonished James in a tweet, and conservative television host Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble.” His retort to his critics was a post to his over ninety-five million Instagram followers of an image with the words “I AM MORE THAN AN ATHLETE.”
When Time magazine named James its 2020 Athlete of the Year, it wrote:
It was James, heir to Jordan on the court and in the boardroom, who established a new paradigm, in which commercial clout exists alongside political principle. He remains one of the world’s top pitchmen. . . . And he has laid waste to the dated notion that political and social engagement is some sort of distraction for athletes. In 2020, James led the NBA in assists, for the first time in his career, before winning the NBA championship and his fourth Finals MVP award, at age 35. Athletes can now bring their full humanity to their games, insisting that their identities be recognized and rejecting the notion that their athleticism is all that matters.3
Much of the world wanted to cast LeBron James narrowly into one role, into one tribe, and he refused to let them do so. He embraced his entire humanity and all of his multitudes to impact the world.
A BROADER, RICHER VIEW OF US
While none of us can be LeBron James, we all can learn from his refusal to be pigeonholed into one role or tribe. Just as James is more than an athlete, we all are more than. We are more than a child, a parent, a student, a job, an ethnicity, an age, or any narrowly constructed box that we or others may want to cage ourselves in. We are more than capable of just being one role, of doing one thing. We are more than capable of being good capitalists and good activists. We are more than capable of making a meaningful difference in our communities through capitalism and activism.
For too long, activism and capitalism have been viewed as distinct ideas manifesting in different activities between two different groups of people. They are often viewed irreconcilably, in black and white, as either the selfless crusade of a larger social cause or the selfish pursuit of a narrow individual profit. In reality, these demarcations and divisions are often arbitrarily self-imposed, and thus they can be self-removed. We all can do better to embrace our multiplicity of roles and capacities to effectuate progress in society using tools of activism, capitalism, and our whole humanity during a new era of change.
Contemporary corporate social activism offers not only a new path to social progress, but also a new perspective for our roles in making this progress real. It offers us a way to see ourselves in a broader, more diverse, and more complete fashion—beyond narrow definitions of activist and capitalist—as a complete person.
BEYOND EITHER/OR
Society often perpetuates a dichotomy between working for the public interest or working for private gain. This notion presupposes that either one can choose to work for the public interest by entering into government service or the nonprofit world or one can choose to work for private gain by going to work for a corporation. Furthermore, the public interest path is seen by many as more noble and socially positive. Year after year, hundreds of thousands of students exit high schools, colleges, law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate schools making life and work decisions based on this dichotomy. While this dichotomy may contain a kernel of truth, it is largely false in light of many changing expectations, policies, and practices in the worlds of business and activism. This falsehood is more obvious now than ever, given the rise of contemporary corporate social activism.
People can choose to do good for society and the public’s interests regardless of where they work. With the rise of corporate social activism, working with and for corporations can improve the public’s interests like never before. Businesses are among the most innovative and powerful engines of economic progress, and they are increasingly becoming vehicles for social progress as well. Although not without their many serious flaws and failings, businesses operating in free markets, through the hard work and ingenuity of the people working with them, have fostered unparalleled wealth creation, economic growth, and technological innovation. Through jobs, goods, and services, corporations have directly created many economic benefits for society. And using their tools, expertise, and resources, they can engage in activism to make a better, more just society as well.
With the rise of corporate social activism, public interest work should mean more than working for the government or a nonprofit organization. The new language and rules of social change are becoming more synonymous with the language and rules of business. The young and the young at heart interested in working for the public’s interests should consider working at businesses, because corporations are at the forefront of many of the leading social challenges of our time, to say nothing of the direct economic benefits that they create for society through better business practices. For instance, if you care about climate change and environmental protection, you should consider working at the Sierra Club or the Environmental Protection Agency, but you should also consider working on the sustainability efforts at Apple or Walmart, two large global corporations that are making huge consequential commitments to sustainable energy and efforts to expand its use.
THE CAPITALIST AND THE ACTIVIST WITHIN
Old perceptions and divisions of public or private, profit or nonprofit, must be stripped away in light of emerging new realities so that the public’s interests can be served from every vantage point. The corporate manager who regularly marches for racial justice or organizes for changes within their company is also an activist, just as the community leader who creates and sells merchandise for her cause online is also a capitalist. Working apart or working together, they are both trying to make their communities better. Neither of their pursuits should be discounted, discouraged, or diminished. The old walls dividing outdated notions of public and private, profit and nonprofit must be torn down, if for no other reason than to ensure that society is not deprived of some of the most promising people year after year because they are forced to choose between doing only this or that in the face of tough, persistent societal challenges that require their attention.
Overcoming these persistent yet pressing challenges—for justice, equality, freedom, liberty, dignity, and a sustainable planet—will not be easy. Even when working well, corporate social activism may fall short and disappoint. Its critics and skeptics are understandably hesitant and rightfully mistrusting of its intentions and ends, as history offers many reasons for that cynical worldview. Persuading the doubtful and the pessimistic will be difficult, as it takes a lot to change a person’s worldview. And it may take a lot more to even try. Nevertheless, however difficult, the failings of the past and the promise of progress in the future demand that we try anyway.
The timely and timeless challenges that confront us as a society are simply too important, too large, and too complex to be left only to the good, hardworking activists and people in government and the nonprofit sector. These challenges require the creativity, ingenuity, resources, and efforts of the private sector as well as the public sector, those working for nonprofit causes as well as those working for very profitable causes. These challenges require the best of us, of all of us.
In the end, the emergence and evolution of contemporary corporate social activism is in one sense a story of how we can meet and master these old yet urgent challenges in new ways, with new perspectives. It is one of the most consequential stories of business and society in recent history and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The conflicts, collaborations, and complexities between and among capitalists and activists will present some of the most fruitful opportunities and dangerous obstacles for meaningful social progress in our time. All of us will be impacted by this unfolding story. It is an incomplete story. Much of it remains to be written. But it is a hopeful one. It is a story that we all share, and can all help shape together by finding the activist and the capitalist within.