Flesh-Colored Lies

Corporate Personhood and the Band-Aid Illusion

Is it serendipity, coincidence, or perhaps... synchronicity that the same American experiment that mass-produced “flesh-colored” band-aids matching only certain flesh also decided corporations could be people? Both decisions seem to share the same fundamental confusion, mistaking the covering for the wound, the symbol for the thing itself, the legal fiction for the breathing reality.

I've been thinking about band-aids lately. Not metaphorical ones, though we'll get there, but actual adhesive strips that come in little paper packages, designed to cover wounds while they heal. This isn't abstract curiosity. I split my thumb open down to the tendons recently, a gash requiring seventeen stitches to close. The kind of wound that laughs at adhesive strips, that forces you to confront the messy reality beneath the skin. The kind that, even after professional intervention, sometimes splits back open as if to say "I'm not done teaching you this lesson yet." The kind that leaves scars that won't be hidden, no matter what shade of "flesh-colored" you slap over them.

For decades, Johnson & Johnson produced them in a single "flesh tone" that matched precisely no one's actual flesh, but approximated a certain kind of paleness that our culture had silently agreed to call "neutral." The unspoken agreement was that visibility itself was the problem. Not the wound, but the fact that others might notice it.

Then something shifted. Band-aids began appearing in different shades, acknowledging the revolutionary concept that human skin comes in more than one color. It shouldn't have been revolutionary, and yet it was. Someone finally realized that for many people, the standard-issue "flesh tone" band-aid called more attention to the wound than it concealed. The covering became more visible than what it was meant to hide.

There's something darkly poetic about how this overlaps with our legal fiction of corporate personhood, another attempt to grant human-like status to something fundamentally inhuman. A photograph of the ocean is not the ocean. A menu is not the meal. A corporation is not a person no matter how many rights we assign it.

And yet we pretend.

The pendulum swing of diversity and inclusion programs reveals this strange paradox. Real people experience actual wounds from systemic exclusion. Corporations respond by offering color-coordinated band-aids. Government changes hands. Corporations decide band-aids are too expensive or controversial. Meanwhile, the wounds remain. They were never about the fucking band-aids to begin with.

What fascinates me is how often these institutional "values" are just tactical positions. They're weather vanes, not compasses, spinning with every shift in the cultural breeze while actual compasses point true regardless of which way the wind blows. The minute the political climate changes, they're facing a completely different direction while insisting they haven't moved at all. The corporations that abandon ship at the first sign of trouble are telling on themselves. Their commitment was never to healing but to the appearance of concern.

It's like watching someone build a beautiful nursery in a house that's actively on fire, then congratulating themselves on their superior parenting. The intention isn't evil; the understanding is just catastrophically incomplete. Just as corporations claim to value their "corporate family" while treating actual human needs as externalities that hurt the bottom line, they fail to see how their pursuit of short-term profit ultimately undermines the very systems they depend on.

Maybe that's the most honest way to understand corporate personhood. Not as some sinister conspiracy but as a category error of cosmic proportions. Like calling viruses "living organisms." They technically meet some criteria while missing the entire fucking point.

The most darkly funny part is that the metaphor extends perfectly to how these corporate entities approach their own existence. They speak of "core values" while having no center. They claim to "stand for" principles while constantly shifting position. They insist they're "committed to progress" while measuring success exclusively in quarterly increments.

They are band-aids pretending to be surgeons.

And perhaps the greatest irony? Real healing never happens through covering but through exposure. Not exposure as in vulnerability theater for social media likes. Exposure as in allowing the wound to breathe, to be seen, to be treated properly rather than merely concealed.

The wound is where the light enters. But only if we stop slapping flesh-colored stickers over the openings and pretending that makes them disappear.

Maybe what we're witnessing isn't regression but clarification. The organizations that maintain their commitment to diversity and inclusion during the backlash are actually showing you who they really are. The ones who ditch it at the first opportunity? They're showing you who they are too.

It's like that moment when the tide goes out and you finally see what's been beneath the water all along. Not progress or regress but revelation, which might be the only kind of progress that actually matters.

The map isn't the territory. The menu isn't the meal. The corporation isn't a person.

And a band-aid, no matter how perfectly it matches your skin tone, will never be a cure.