Over the past two decades, Gee’s Bend quilts have captured the public’s imagination with their kaleidoscopic colors and their daring geometric patterns. The groundbreaking art practice was cultivated by direct descendants of slaves in rural Alabama who have faced oppression, geographic isolation and intense material constraints.
As of this year, their improvisational art has also come to embody a very modern question: What happens when distinctive cultural tradition collides with corporate America?
Enter Target. The multinational retailer launched a limited-edition collection based on the quilters’ designs for Black History Month this year. Consumer appetites proved to be high as many stores around the country sold out of the checkered sweaters, water bottles and faux-quilted blankets.
Unlike the pay structure of the Freedom Quilting Bee of the 1960s — an artist-run collective that disbursed payment equitably to Gee’s Bend quilters, who were salaried and could set up Social Security benefits — one-off partnerships with companies like Target benefit only a small number of people, in this case five women from two families.
Corporations have a fiduciary obligation to maximize profit for shareholders. That is the primary reason for their existence. It is not to meet a need, promote well being, or respect cultural traditions, it’s only to maximize profit. If in the pursuit of maximum profits a corporation does end up meeting some need or promoting well being, it is incidental. Popular theory is that the companies that best meet their consumers needs will also be the most profitable, but reality is much more complicated than that and this theory often doesn’t hold up, which is unfortunate because it is the basis for our entire economic system. We have built our entire economic system on the idea that the pursuit of profit should be the highest ideal. I think we can now say conclusively that was a mistake.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to honor shareholders trust. Not necessarily to maximize profits.
It certainly seems that in the vast majority of cases, shareholders feel their trust is best honored when profits are maximized, and that their trust is violated when profits are insufficient.