Popular whiskey brand Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Forman Corp. plans on abandoning the brand’s corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, according to a letter the company sent a letter to employees last month, according to Bloomberg. It’s quite a move considering the company’s rather DEI-heavy history.
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Brown-Forman will no longer connect compensation to DEI objectives, participate in the Human Rights Campaign’s corporate-equality index or try to work with diverse suppliers, despite the fact that a former slave helped Jack Daniel with the whiskey distillation process— which was pivotal to the brand’s success.
The company also explained that it will end its participation in an annual ranking of companies with an LGBTQ-friendly work environment. The decision comes after right-wing activist Robby Starbuck threatened to lead a boycott against Jack Daniel’s until they removed halted their DEI efforts.
Since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions last year, Starbuck has pressured entities in the private sector to follow suit. It’s an ironic move consider Jack Daniel’s owes its success to a Black man.
A young Daniel met a formerly enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green in the 1800s. Green learned how to perfect his method of filtering whiskey through charcoal and taught Daniel how to do the same. However, Green’s work went unacknowledged for over a century.
It wasn’t until Jack Daniel’s 150th anniversary in 2016 that the company began to honor Green through social media posts and distillery tours. A year later, Jack Daniel’s parent company acknowledged Green as the brand’s first master distiller on its company website.
Fawn Weaver, the founder of Black-owned spirits brand Uncle Nearest, honored Green’s legacy before starting her company. For years, she shed light on his work with Daniel through extensive research and interviews with descendants.
Even though Jack Daniel’s is willfully erasing all of the progress its made, Weaver insisted that supporting Black-owned businesses is one of the ways we can celebrate our own.
“We need more Uncle Nearests. So how do we create more Uncle Nearests? The answer is to make sure the Black brands that are coming out, and are out, actually have the resources they need,” Weaver said to The Spirits Business in 2020.
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