Before Occupy Wall Street, before the Bernie Sanders campaign, before all the heckling against “the one percent,” the op-eds on wealth inequality and the sold-out “Stop Oligarchy” tours, Chris Rock’s surreal 2001 comedy Pootie Tang brazenly—if bizarrely—foretold of an America in the thrall of a ruthless, racist plutocracy.
Long before mainstream economics and journalism offered a critique of concentrated corporate power, Pootie Tang portrayed capitalists as monopolistic syndicates shilling cigarettes, fast food, malt liquor, rat poison, switchblades and children’s “pork-chunk cereal” through the evil firm, the Lector Corporation. Bizarre as it may seem, stories like this would soon headline the publications of America’s storied news organizations.
Decades after the film’s release, books like Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe’s When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm exposed how a single firm like McKinsey turbo-charged the opioid crisis, ICE detention, youth vaping, mass layoffs, authoritarian governments, cigarette sales and carbon pollution. In retrospect, Pootie’s portrayal of corporations’ ghoulish despotism was always fact, not fiction.
The strange reality is this—when stalwart institutions of American society refused to interrogate the structure of power and the economy, when the world’s most dominant firms and entrepreneurs were accruing unbelievable influence, it was oftentimes only in Black satirical art that one could see popular criticisms of the dangers of oligarchy.
