Unilever stock lost about $2 billion in market capitalization amid calls to boycott Ben & Jerry’s ice cream after the company posted a Fourth of July message saying the United States should hand Mount Rushmore over to Native Americans.
Shares of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch multinational company, dropped about 0.5 percent on Friday, 0.8 percent on Thursday, and 0.5 the previous day. It’s not clear if the drop was due to the calls to boycott Ben & Jerry’s, which has been owned by Unilever since 2000.
It all started when the Vermont-based ice cream company wrote that “this 4th of July, it’s high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it,” before it posted a link to a blog post asserting that the United States hand back the famed national monument with four presidents to native tribal assets.
“The faces on Mount Rushmore are the faces of men who actively worked to destroy Indigenous cultures and ways of life, to deny Indigenous people their basic rights,” the post alleged.