Justice ReMix’d is the newest of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavors, somewhere between churro and fudge, with cinnamon and chocolate ice cream mixed, adulterated with chunks of cinnamon bun dough and fudge with a bit of a kick. And there’s another kick in the mix too: a portion of all proceeds from the new flavor are going to Advancement Project, a civil rights group aimed at supporting and amplifying grassroots, pro-equality, pro-democracy social movements.
Justice ReMix’d isn’t Ben & Jerry’s first political flavor. In 2016, the company sold Bernie’s Yearning to raise funds for Bernie Sanders’ run for the Democratic Presidential nomination. In that year, founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were both arrested in protests at the U.S. Capitol. (They were both released that night.) In 2017, the company’s service locations in Australia took a stand for same-sex marriage, refusing to serve two scoops of a single flavor.
In 2018, Pecan Resist came out, a flavor whose proceeds were donated to the opposition campaign against Donald Trump, to “lick injustice.” In 2019, the flavor “Bernie’s Back” wasn’t made available to the public but was awarded to 40 contest winners for meritorious work on Sanders’ second campaign for the Democratic nomination.
Which brings us to 2020. Ben & Jerry’s has so far stopped advertising on Facebook to protest the platform’s divisive engagement practices, defended migrants entering the U.K. from Syria via France, and now allied itself with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Along with the funds from Justice ReMix’d, the ice cream company is also funding a podcas hosted by author Carvell Wallace to talk about how “legal discrimination and state-sanctioned brutality continued long after slavery ended, profoundly limiting Black Americans’ ability to gain access to jobs, housing, education, and health care; or to create and accumulate wealth,” according to its blurb. The podcast, titled “Who We Are,” will come out in six parts, with the first episode to go live on September 15, 2020.
Photo by GagliardiPhotography / Shutterstock.com
