Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing column called Camden Front and Center, analyzing the city’s politics, development, and power structures. It reflects the author’s examination and perspective on how decisions by political, business, and civic leaders impact the city’s Black and Latino residents.

As a teenager, I had a few jobs—under-the-table jobs, stipend jobs, and regular jobs. But when I turned 16, I got my first real summer job. I participated in a career exploration program with Respond Inc. in Camden. Respond was a social service agency known for early childhood development, but they also worked with school-aged students.

Their program placed Camden students at various businesses around the city—accounting firms, law firms, architects, restaurants—we were placed all over. As for my three other colleagues and me, we were assigned to what was considered the top work site: the Campbell Soup Company.

Campbell Soup is a staple in many households across the country. However, it has been a staple in Camden for over a hundred years. Anyone can read the company’s history on its website, but that history doesn’t necessarily tell the story of what Campbell Soup meant to the Black and brown people of the city.

Not only did the soup fill the residents’ stomachs, but it also paid the bills for many of them, as they worked in the downtown factory. When I arrived at the corporate offices, the factory was gone, and the only residents—Black and brown folks—working were what you’d expect: mainly maintenance, janitorial, and secretarial staff, with some people scattered throughout corporate departments. Additionally, much of the food service staff in the cafeteria was Black.

Sadly, none of it was anything that I wasn’t used to.

I went to a high school where the majority of people—students, teachers, administrators, and even the support staff—were white. So, it wasn’t a shock to realize that corporate America was essentially no different, because in America, anything “good” or of “quality,” whether a school or a workplace, was full of white people. Anywhere Black folks were in the majority wasn’t “good” or “quality” according to mainstream culture. The aspersion continues today, but I digress.

What easily stood out to me was the feel of the building: it didn’t feel like we were in Camden. That’s the thing about white (institutional) spaces in Camden when erected. They’re made to give a sense of security to white folks that they’re not in Camden. Last week I had a meeting in the recently opened Hilton Hotel on the waterfront, and I had the same feeling. But you kinda get that feeling when an establishment goes out of its way to keep Camden folk out of its building, but I digress. 

A place in Camden that doesn’t feel like Camden is a space where you’ll see white or white-adjacent people comfortably moving and engaging. It’s an aesthetically pleasing area that’s been cleared of the “riffraff,” thanks to its strategic location either downtown or by the waterfront, away from where the “people” live. The only Black and brown folks visible and unheard are usually the maintenance, janitorial, and secretarial staff. This kind of gentrification is corporate-driven, made possible by huge tax breaks. It’s the type of gentrification where white people take over a city by carving out what they see as the most valuable space and making it theirs—replicating the neighborhoods they left behind; areas that are unwelcoming to Black and brown residents.

The phenomenon of white folks fleeing places like Camden—or any urban center as Black and brown people enter—is known as white flight; the flight of white folks to the suburbs. Not only white people but also the industry fled along with white people, as Campbell Soup did by closing its factory in 1992. And while corporate gentrification is happening in Camden, white flight hasn’t gone away. It simply looks different.

Not only can white people choose where they want to live, but they can also choose how they want to live. For example, they have the privilege to decide where they want to live, where to send their children to school, where they wish to work without fear of being denied a job because of their name or skin color, and what foods they will or won’t eat. For those with such privilege, Campbell’s Soup remains a staple; an economical component to a humble meal.

However, former Campbell Soup Company executive Martin Bally’s words cast the company in a negative light.

Bally was recently fired for comments suggesting that the Soup company’s products are “highly processed food” for “poor people.” News of these comments surfaced as a result of a lawsuit by Robert Garza, a former employee who says he was fired as retaliation for complaining about Bally’s racist remarks about working with Indian workers. It’s likely that without the release of Bally’s remarks made on a video, he’d still be employed at the company.

Because typically, when racist and classist comments and behaviors remain “in-house,” associations remain intact. But when such behavior is outed, typically, white folks flee and single out the person or persons caught as the culprit, who is not representative of the group. In its public comments, Campbell Soup says it isn’t racist or elitist, and that it doesn’t hold such views—it simply happened to employ someone who did. But they’re gone, so the problem is solved.

But it’s not solved.

I don’t have concrete evidence to prove what I am about to say, like Mr. Garza’s video of Mr. Bally, but my spidey senses tell me that more folks who work for Campbell Soup, and the many other corporations in Camden, and nationwide, think like Mr. Bally. It was only a few years ago that the CEO of Holtec Industries, Krishna Singh, said Camden residents don’t want to work because they have no tradition of work in their families. Holtec received $260 million in tax breaks for relocating to Camden.

I’m sure people like Mr. Bally and Mr. Singh thought the same way when I worked at Campbell Soup in high school. However, I was treated mainly well because I was likely considered “different.” I went to a parochial school at the time. I spoke well, and my “little engine that could” aspirations to become a lawyer made it easier to give a Black kid a chance. I can’t assume that how I was received and treated was all patronizing or out of pity. I don’t believe that it was. But I’d be foolish to think that presuppositions didn’t exist about Black people, and that I wasn’t seen in comparison to what those presuppositions influenced white people to think about Black people.

If Campbell Soup wishes to let this bad PR blow over, and they do, they’ll continue as they have been, with carefully crafted statements to affirm their commitment to quality products and treating all people fairly. But this is an excellent opportunity to put such statements into practice—the part about treating people fairly. Not just philosophically, but in its policies of hiring, promotion, marketing, and leadership. But, likely for fear of pushback from the president, they’ll walk the tightrope of not drawing the ire of Donald Trump while not losing customers.

Meanwhile, Camden residents remain subject to sharing their city with people who believe in stereotypes and myths about Black and brown people and the poor.

What does that matter when people must take accountability for their lives and the circumstances of them, you may ask? That’s certainly a question asked when anyone attempts to defend Camden residents.

Welp, it’s hard for the people to take accountability when tax breaks that could help the people change their circumstances go to corporations whose employees make the kind of money to change circumstances, and blame poor people of color for their circumstances. It’s hard for Black and brown people to be treated humanely when their government continues to sell them out to the highest bidder. It’s hard for people to improve their circumstances when their schools are under siege, and initiatives or programs designed to help do more harm.

But rather than talk about that, people like Martin Bally would rather disparage the poor, claiming the company he worked for made below-quality food fitting for the poor… and we only know about it because someone decided to sue the company over it. That’s why Campbell Soup fired Bally. They got caught.

I wonder if they’ll ever be caught genuinely caring about the community where they live and the people who rely on their products, rather than simply trying to make a buck. I wish I could say firing Bally makes them one step closer. But I can’t.