Think Before You Pink Goes Rogue is a political education campaign that connects the dots between environmental racism, fossil fuel divestment, and the politics of breast cancer.
In this year’s Think Before You Pink® campaign, Think Before You Pink Goes Rogue, we’re expanding beyond the campaign’s traditional areas of focus: corporate accountability and pink ribbon marketing culture. We’re breaking new ground by building out the campaign to include deeper political education programming, toward the goal of strengthening our community, aligning our shared understandings of the politics of breast cancer, and ultimately to build the collective power necessary to achieve health justice for all.
When we launched our first industry-disrupting campaign, pink ribbons were everywhere.
For over 20 years, our community of passionate activists has joined us in calling out the pinkwashing, profiteering, and empty awareness that takes place during breast cancer “awareness” month that does little more than line corporate pockets. You heard the call to collective action, and over time, you helped us expose the dark underbelly of pink ribbon cause marketing.
Together, we changed the landscape. Our award-winning campaign, Think Before You Pink®, along with the integrated support of the film and book, Pink Ribbons, Inc., brought about a sea change in our movement. It took persistence and relentless dedication but with your help, we got there. With breast cancer activists nationwide, we’ve changed the way pink ribbons have been used, by demanding greater transparency and accountability.
And now, thanks to the accountability demanded by breast cancer activists, there are fewer meaningless pink ribbon products on the market, offering us the opportunity to do more.
Built upon 20 years of bold calls for transparency and accountability, Think Before You Pink has grown beyond the bounds of corporate accountability. Our 20th anniversary was recognized with “A (R)Evolution” in which we looked back on two decades of pink ribbon marketing, tied it all together, and said the quiet part out loud: an unrestrained culture of profit-before-people (i.e., rampant, unregulated capitalism) is the common culprit underlying twenty years of pink ribbon marketing campaigns.
We’ve paved the way for people to identify and call out all sorts of consumption-driven corporate nonsense, like pinkwashing, greenwashing, and rainbow-washing, and we’ve exposed the facts: it’s capitalism that enables profiteering off of causes like breast cancer. Since naming this all-encompassing lens and connecting the dots across our two decades of corporate accountability campaigns, we’re ready to break new ground again.
We’re expanding Think Before You Pink to strengthen our political education programming, to build our collective power and take action toward systemic change.
BCAction defines Political Education as the collective process of study, research, and analysis, to develop the shared knowledge, skills, and political alignment necessary to learn to challenge systems of power and achieve collective goals.
Many of our community members are experts in BCAction’s programmatic priorities, our perspective on the breast cancer movement, and our longstanding Think Before You Pink campaign. And many of our members are new. To move forward together as we expand the focus of this campaign, we’re offering foundational definitions to ensure alignment for all breast cancer activists who support the work to address and end breast cancer.
Yes, Think Before You Pink began to grow beyond the bounds of the classic corporate accountability campaign structure in 2020. That year, instead of targeting a single, for-profit pink ribbon product, our 2020 campaign “We Can’t Be Pink’d” went big and called out the president and his administration for a lack of leadership on the breast cancer crisis. BCAction exposed “pink policies” at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice, and the National Cancer Institute that exacerbated breast cancer.
We Can’t Be Pink’d hinted at the burgeoning expansion of this campaign, and we’ve felt the rumblings of that growth ever since.
While political education has always been a part of our annual campaigns, centering political education as the primary strategy in Think Before You Pink is an expansion of the campaign, which has historically focused on corporate accountability. And the tactics of a campaign determine who is centered: in a corporate accountability campaign, we’re targeting industry and corporate leaders. In this iteration of the campaign, as a political education campaign, we’re focused on deepening relationships and political alignment with our community of breast cancer activists.
By doing something new, we’re doing what we’ve always done – staying at the forefront of the breast cancer movement and continuing to push the boundaries as to what falls within the realm of breast cancer activism.
You betcha. It’s who we are.
And we still want to hear from you, as grassroots breast cancer activists who know your community best. When you spot pinkwashing campaigns local to you, you can alert us by tagging us on Facebook and Instagram or by emailing info@bcaction.org. We’ll support you in calling out pinkwashers, and can offer tools for going beyond “awareness” and buying pink, with resources like our updated Think Before You Pink Toolkit and Critical Questions to Ask Before You Buy Pink.
Join us in going rogue this year by reading the full campaign details, checking back each week as new content launches, and following us on Facebook and Instagram, so that you don’t miss the latest updates.
Think Before You Pink Goes Rogue will explore the intersections of:
Together, breast cancer activists across the nation will again go beyond “awareness” this October, and we’ll do more – by taking collective action to address and end the breast cancer crisis.