Pastel Injustice: The Corporate Use of Pinkwashing for Profit

Abstract

This article discusses the importance of recognizing pinkwashing, the practice of using the color pink and pink ribbons to indicate a company has joined the search for a breast cancer cure and to invoke breast cancer solidarity, even when the company may be using chemicals linked to cancer. This article argues that pinkwashing is a form of social injustice directed at women in the United States because the practice a) provides a vehicle for corporations to control the public experience of breast cancer, while simultaneously increasing profits and potentially contributing to the rising rate of the disease; b) obscures an environmental health discourse that recognizes the environmental causes of breast cancer; and c) co-opts or redirects women's experiences of the disease by narrowly defining what is possible.

Co-producing Psychiatric Education with Service User Educators: a Collective Autobiographical Case Study of the Meaning, Ethics, and Importance of Payment

“…Our group discussed some of the pitfalls associated with participating in other volunteer "opportunities." For example, breast cancer awareness and fundraising have been criticized as "pinkwashing," a form of social injustice against women [38] wherein shopping and buying pink ribbon products became a distraction that inadvertently discouraged the public from asking controversial questions [39]. These connections with volunteerism were viewed by our group as a caution to keep our work from losing its critical focus, as SB highlighted: "There has been a mass appropriation of recovery that has been used to forward a neo-liberal agenda.…”

Consumer Activism for Social Change

“…Another concern about consumer activism is the potential for corporate cooptation of consumerist goals. An example of this is "pinkwashing", which is when companies use the color pink to symbolize that their products support breast cancer research as a marketing tool toward ethical shoppers, when the companies might do little to support breast cancer research, and may actually have products that include pesticides that lead to breast cancer (Lubitow & Davis, 2011). Whatever the cause, social workers can play a role in educating consumers about pinkwashing and other forms of cooptation, persuading companies to stop using deceptive advertising, and providing accurate information to consumers interested in becoming more socially conscious consumers, which is in line with the social work technology standards (NASW, 2017a).…”

Big Football: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Culture and Color of Injury in America’s Most Popular Sport

“…xi, 118-121). Just as the ubiquitous pink campaigns mask racial and socioeconomic disparities in access to cancer treatment and mortality rates and stress the radical hope of medicine and technology over a consideration of the environmental and industrial causes of cancer and the functioning of health care systems (Jain, 2007; King, 2006; Lubitow & Davis, 2011; Pezzullo, 2003), the expressed appreciation for veterans does not entail a critical appraisal of the military industrial complex or the overrepresentation of poor people in the military (Lutz, 2008). While the figure of the “wounded warrior” is of course linked to implications of injury, commemoration in a “conflated sporting-military space” (Rugg, 2016b, p. 218) invites the viewer to play the role of a respectful, approving consumer of capitalist destructiveness and express consolation for seemingly inevitable generational traumas rather than engage in politics or recognize “basic human costs” “in the context of profit” (Butterworth, 2014b; Fischer, 2014; Jain, 2007, p. 506; T.…”