Attention anti-woke factions of the world. I want to share some essential financial news that could save your life: be on the lookout for woke banks. That’s right, even the financial lending system of savings and investments has gone woke.
As reported by Anand Giridharadas on Twitter, if you withdraw money from one of these banks, “the ATM takes a few extra minutes to tell me the true history of the founding father on the bills I have just withdrawn. You will not believe some of these guys!”
Watch out for those loan officers who try to sell you an anti-prime loan, “Another thing I love about my Woke Bank is that you can withdraw money from anyone’s account. They’re not fixated on “private property.” You just say someone’s name and their Privilege Score on a scale from 1 to 10, and if your Score is lower, you can withdraw from their account!”
The entire thread is here.
So, suppose you encounter a bank ATM that upon dispensing your tender tells you that George Washington participated in genocide and, along with other Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and their descendants, enslaved people kidnapped from Africa or bred in the master’s house. Or maybe the history of Trump’s favorite president Andrew Jackson as “a slaver, ethnic cleanser, and tyrant” is the nugget of knowledge the machine AI? gives you when dispensing your paper cash. In that case, you know you have found a woke bank. If you encounter a bank allowing venture capitalists to play with other people’s private savings, you know it must be a woke bank.
If this happens to you, immediately contact your nearest FBI agent’s real estate broker to report the crime.
Click here for a crowd-sourced map that gathers similar information about white-collar crime.
Oh, and woke banks also get government bailouts – that are not called government bailouts.
In all seriousness, capitalism’s capacity to capture and profit from political movements as a statement of economic solidarity is one of the themes explored in After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle, by Cedric G. Johnson.
“The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms?… For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration.”
Anand Giridharadas is most recently the author of The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.
