Thread by @GeeDee215

Never heard of LulaRoe until v recently. There’s a LOT of race stuff in MLMs. (the way i heard target sellers described was “Mormons, [stay at home] moms, and minorities”: people with tight, cooperative social networks + constrained avenues to lucrative employment/compensation

https://twitter.com/aarickawash/status/1437039736930152452

This doc shows just how white the LulaRoe universe is. But that makes sense, right? These are Mormon and evangelical stay-at-home moms who are pumping their friend and family circles for sales. Even at five or six degrees removed, how many WOC are they likely to *know*?

And that white woman-ness in the network effects is embedded in the branding: even if them leggings were not hideous, they’re going to be received as vaguely MAGA-ass fashion.

They don’t have the credibility to rubber-stamp those tights as cool to people who ain’t them.

(Contrast that with Herbalife, whose pyramid is much browner, but with similar racialized network effects at play.)

a podcast called The Dream goes into the history/sociology of MLMs — did you know Avon started in the late 1800s??? — and lays out how they’re linked to the development of capitalism (“we’re making products but we need people to sell them!”), prosperity gospel, + gendered labor.

all of us are bombarded w/ the same messages abt “meaningful” work + the social cachet that comes w/ that work, about the “courage” of entrepreneurs, etc

It’s easy to roll your eyes at ppl who fall for MLMs but ppl go to med school + launch startups motivated by the same logics

“You shouldn’t have to spend all this money to make money!”

Like, what is a business loan then? Or a mortgage, even?

A significant percentage of people in my age cohort and younger are drowning in student debt. Why did they take out all that money they ain’t have when…?