Roommates, as if you needed another reason to love the popular ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s—you may just fall in love all over again when you find out just how hard they came for standing up against racial discrimination and racial inequality. In an empowering post on social media, Ben & Jerry’s called for a complete dismantling of white supremacy while naming some of those recently lost to police brutality.
Ben & Jerry’s has always been one of the few brands to publicly stand in support of a wide range of issues, including gay rights, women’s rights, animal rights—and most crucially, racial inequality and #BlackLivesMatter.
In a recent post on the company website and on social media, Ben & Jerry’s posted the following message:
“What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning. What happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis is the fruit borne of toxic seeds planted on the shores of our country in Jamestown in 1619, when the first enslaved men and women arrived on this continent. Floyd is the latest in a long list of names that stretches back to that time and that shore. Some of those names we know – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, Martin Luther King, Jr. – most we don’t.”
However, that wasn’t all. Ben & Jerry’s also called on Trump and other elected officials to publicly disavow white supremacists—and urged Congress to pass H.R. 40, which is a legislation that would create a commission to study the effects of slavery and discrimination from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.
The company also asked that the Department of Justice to reinvigorate its Civil Rights Division. In case you didn’t know, Ben & Jerry’s supports the creation of a national task force aimed at ending racial violence and increasing police accountability.
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