Jack Daniel’s Owner Scraps DEI Policies Despite the Brand’s Complicated History With Race
This July 9, 2018, file photo shows bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey displayed at Rossi’s Deli in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
On Wednesday, Brown-Forman, the company behind major spirits brands like Jack Daniel’s, Old Forester, Woodford Reserve and Herradura, sent an email to its employees informing them of plans to abandon its corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“We launched our diversity and inclusion strategy in 2019,” Brown-Forman wrote in an email shared by producer, director and anti-DEI spokesperson Robby Starbuck. “Since then, the world has evolved, our business has changed, and the legal and external landscape has shifted dramatically, particularly within the United States. With these new dynamics at play, we must adjust our work to ensure it continues to drive business results while appropriately recognizing the current environment in which we find ourselves.”
In the email, Brown-Forman wrote that it will remove its workforce and supplier diversity ambitions, as well as end its participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index — a tool that ranks American businesses on their treatment of LGBTQ employees.
Brown-Forman additionally wrote that it will ensure that its executive incentives and employee goals are related to business performance (as opposed to diversity) and review its training programs for “consistency with an evolved strategy.”
This move may raise some eyebrows considering the complicated history with race Jack Daniel’s has.
Until Uncle Nearest founder and CEO Fawn Nearest’s intensive research and work sharing the story, Jack Daniel’s failed to acknowledge the immense impact of former enslaved man Nathan “Nearest” Green on its history. Green taught Jack Daniel himself how to make whiskey and was the first master distiller in Jack Daniel’s history — a fact that was unknown to the public until a 2016 story in the New York Times from Clay Risen, followed by the work of Weaver, who went on to establish Uncle Nearest, a competing Tennessee whiskey brand.
As Weaver detailed in her recently released book, “Love & Whiskey,” a significant portion of the Jack Daniel’s leadership team was wary of her work and in favor of heavily competing and attempting to defeat Uncle Nearest — despite the fact that Uncle Nearest doesn’t have any intent of painting Jack Daniel’s namesake in a negative light (Daniel was not a slave owner and was, by all accounts, a friend to Nearest).
Follow The Daily Pour:
