If you live in the United States, Mars, Inc. wants you to know that it’s woke.
However, if you live in a country where an authoritarian government is committing genocide against an ethnic minority, the company won’t say anything. The confectionery giant announced last week that the anthropomorphic M&Ms used in advertising will undergo some cosmetic changes.
The green M&M will wear sneakers instead of go-go boots, the red M&M will be nicer to the other M&Ms, and the brown M&M will have its prefix removed (going from Ms. Brown to Brown). Mars said it removed the prefix to focus on “their personalities, rather than their gender.”
This is ridiculous for many reasons. The biggest reason, however, is that the company does not care about the well-being of Uyghur Muslims in China despite doing business there. And seeing as they are suffering a genocide, the plight of the Uyghurs is a far more significant concern than the silliness that Mars is currently fixated on.
It makes zero difference in the world whether or not the brown M&M is Ms. Brown or just Brown. That does not affect anyone’s life. The same is true of the company changing the shoes on the green M&M. Generally, if people like the candy, they’ll eat it. If people don’t like the candy, they won’t. The world is not a better place because of the changes that Mars has made.
Yet Mars has never commented on the wrongdoings of the Chinese government, including the genocide against the Uyghur people. It also hasn’t spoken out against the mistreatment of the democratic Hong Kong. Nor has Mars said anything about the oppression of the Tibetan people by the Chinese government. The same is true when it comes to Beijing’s unwarranted aggression directed at Taiwan. Instead, Mars acts as a sponsor in support of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. And get this: Mars never commented on China building more coal-fired power plants. That seems antithetical to reducing global carbon emissions.
We should note that climate concern because Mars’s selective morality extends beyond its disinterest in genocide. Ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow last year, the company called for swift action to combat climate change. Mars said that the action required to reduce carbon emissions needed to be “bolder and faster.”
It’s a lot easier for a multibillion-dollar corporation to ignore real repression and focus on what kind of shoes a piece of candy wears on television commercials. But that’s exactly what Mars and CEO Grant F. Reid are doing. They should be ashamed.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
