Ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s has drawn public ire from all sides by posting a controversial tweet calling on the United States to return stolen land to First Nations for Independence Day.
“This 4th of July, it is high time to recognize that the United States exists on stolen indigenous lands, and that we pledge to return them”, can we read in the tweet of the company belonging to the British multinational Unilever, according to The Telegraph on Thursday.
The tweet seen more than 26.8 million times, posted in the middle of the 4th of July celebrations, struck a chord in the United States, as the company claimed that the famous Mount Rushmore, where the faces of four American presidents, be returned to the Sioux Lakota tribes.
“The faces on Mount Rushmore are those of men who actively worked to destroy Indigenous cultures and their way of life, to deny Indigenous peoples their basic rights,” Ben & Jerry’s continued in a statement accompanying the tweet.
But for many, the intervention did not go down well, to the point where the company was compared to beer company Bud Light, whose sales plummeted in May after teaming up with a transgender influencer.
“Ben & Jerry’s used Independence Day to speak out AGAINST AMERICA. Will the day finally come when America-hating corporations realize what happens when they bite the hand that feeds them?” Republican candidate Lavern Spicer said, according to The Telegraph.
Others instead used the comment section to in turn accuse the company of operating a factory on stolen land.
“If you want to impress me, build a factory on native land and share the profits with the tribe. But no, you are using a minority as a political tool to sell ice cream instead,” reacted one of the Internet users under the tweet.
2023-07-06 11:53:32
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