Casey’s Reviews
10 Worst Pride Campaigns
Corporate rainbow-washing at its finest
It’s that time of the year again: Pride Month. While most of us LGBTQ2IA folx will be promoting queer-owned businesses to support members of our community, major corporations will be taking advantage of our enthusiasm by plastering their brands with rainbows and inclusive language just long enough to get us to spend our money before leaving us holding the bag.
Not every “yassified” logo or marketing campaign is progressive. Some are bandwagon-hoppers hoping to make a quick buck; some are earnest but miss the mark entirely; some are straight-up exploitation and/or laughably ironic, as with the rainbow-painted bench in this cover photo. What a lovely paint job on an anti-homeless design! It’s almost as if the rainbow is meant to distract from the fact that cities deliberately punish people for sleeping rough, or that queer youth are over-represented in poverty statistics (25-40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+). [x]
As Nathan Chen has recently written for Prism & Pen, big-name brands hijack Pride Month every year to line their pockets without doing anything meaningful to demonstrate allyship. In fact, many brands rainbow-wash their products while actively harming the LGBTQ+ community.
