As Corporations Roll Back DEI, Let’s Not Lose Focus

It’s been a week. I don’t mean that in the figurative, flippant ‘man, it’s been a week’ way — even though, yes, it has been A WEEK — I literally mean it has been one week and a few days since Donald Trump was sworn into office as the 47th president of the United States of America and in those days, he has attempted to undo decades of social progress, rolled back years of work in the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) space, sent ICE agents to rip people from their jobs, and a Nazi salute was done onstage in his name. The same people who will try to say we didn’t see what we saw (a Nazi salute is a Nazi salute is a Nazi salute) will also try to convince us that these other efforts — the targeting of immigrants, trans people, marginalized and racialized groups — are not rooted in racism and bigotry. They’ll try to pretend that this is all business as usual and that the businesses shutting down their DEI initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders aren’t willingly adhering to the prejudicial policies of this new authoritarian administration.

The corporations are complicit. Period. On Friday, Target became the latest company to announce its intentions to reduce diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — specifically, Target said in its announcement that it is “concluding [its] three-year diversity, equity and inclusion goals”, “stopping all external diversity-focused surveys, including HRC’s Corporate Equality Index” and “evolving [its] ‘Supplier Diversity’ team to ‘Supplier Engagement’ with more of a focus on “a broad range of suppliers.” The company joins Amazon, Walmart, Meta, McDonald’s, and many government organizations like NASA who are following the lead of Trump’s executive order. On January 22, the White House sent a memo which read, “Send a notification to all employees of DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) offices that they are being placed on paid administrative leave effective immediately as the agency takes steps to close/end all DEIA initiatives, offices and programs.” Since then, there has been online outrage, including calls to boycott the above retailers, and reactions from the people impacted by these decisions, including a few of the faces behind Target’s most high-profile Black brand partnerships like entrepreneur and resident Internet Auntie, Tabitha Brown. The company’s DEI rollback will no doubt also have an impact on the Black and minority-owned brands the company stocks and sells. These brands were acquired and promoted heavily after George Floyd was murdered by police and the country, including many massive corporations, promised a “racial reckoning.”  

I want to come back to Brown, because her reaction has made her this week’s main character in the fight against DEI, but first and foremost, let’s place the blame where it belongs. Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do. He ran on hate, on white fragility and white panic, the fear that they are losing power, control and their ability to oppress other groups in America. And some of those other groups did vote for Trump, against their own interests. As the saying goes, “When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Trump and his far right base are purported to be gatekeepers of masculinity, the opposite of weak “woke” snowflakes, and yet, it’s their crippling fear of losing their undeserved stronghold on the country that is behind every single one of these cowardly decisions. 

“DEI” — like “woke,” and “CRT (critical race theory)” before it — has lost its true meaning in the internet ether; it has been twisted by conservatives to further stoke fear and division, the exact antithesis of its intention. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts exist within workplaces to encourage equality and promote fairness, fostering environments without discrimination, not just based on race. “Such initiatives comprise many practices that aim to uplift different marginalized groups in the workplace,” Megan Cerullo writes for CBS News. “For example, a policy that accommodates working parents, such as flexible work hours, could qualify as DEI. So could establishing affinity groups based on shared identities, like sexual orientation.” Veterans also fall under DEI. Unsurprisingly, research from the past few years shows that many DEI programs have overwhelmingly benefited white women. A now-deleted thread on X of a MAGA supporter begging for Trump to save his wife’s job because it was impacted by these rollbacks went viral (cue Franchesca Ramsey on TikTok singing about leopards eating faces). But in the past few days, the plot has been lost. 

“DEI” has turned into a stand-in for “affirmative action” and the discourse has turned into debates over “merit-based” hiring and “reverse racism” (which once again, for the people in the back, does not exist). What these arguments fail to understand is that DEI protections were put in place for certain groups because of historically discriminatory hiring practices and to course-correct toxic, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and sexist workplaces. These programs don’t disregard merit, they enforce it.

The many marginalized people who deserve to be hired for their credentials (who are often over qualified), who have earned the right to be treated fairly at work, and whose products deserve a fair shot to be available to consumers — these people are who DEI initiatives are supposed to protect. They are the natural progression of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion and other criteria. Sixty years later, Trump's Jan. 21 executive order called "Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity" effectively proposes to revoke the Equal Employment Opportunity rule signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.

I’ve written before about how certain DEI programs – namely, “listening and learning” sessions — were often hijacked by white guilt and led by white people (only 4% of the DEI positions were held by Black people in 2023, according to Black Enterprise) rendering them ineffective in actually tackling racism in the workplace. Instead of addressing the issues within DEI, or actually listening to Black folks about the very real systemic barriers and how to fix them, we’re fighting over civil-rights era legislation and fending off racist dogwhistles about meritocracy that have been used to undermine Black intelligence and qualifications for decades. 

Which brings us back to Tabitha Brown and Target. After the company announced its plan to rollback DEI initiatives, Brown posted videos to Instagram responding to the move and the calls to boycott Target. (Strike For All, organized by Nina Turner, seems to be the most popular movement pushing customers to quit the retailer.) In the first clip, Brown expresses her frustration at the situation silently, eating grapes and having a conversation with her eyes, seemingly directed at other fed-up Black folks. We got it. But a day later, she posted another video directly addressing Target’s DEI rollbacks. 

“Contrary to what the world might tell you, it has been very hard for Black-owned businesses,” Brown says, acknowledging that she is in business with Target, Walmart, and Amazon. “If we all decide to boycott, I get it, but so many of us would be affected. Our sales would drop and our businesses would be hurt,” she continues. “And if any of you know business, it doesn’t just happen overnight — where you can just go take all your stuff and pull it off the shelves. There’s a process. And then, where are you gonna put it? You gotta have a place to store it, and that’s money. Then, you gotta have another place to sell it. Which is almost impossible sometimes. And even if you sell online, it’s a process when it comes to business. And everyone does not have the funds or the means or the availability or the space to house their own products.”

Brown’s point, which is valid, is that there was a reason many Black-owned brands chose to get in large business with retailers like Target to begin with. They have the infrastructure, they have the platform and the dollars to get their products in front of the masses. It’s about accessibility. And it isn’t as easy as pulling products from shelves and continuing to be successful, she says. If the point of the boycott is to punish Target for failing to support Black businesses, Brown argues that it would just hurt those same Black-owned brands. 

“If we all decide to stop supporting said businesses, even the businesses who are affected by the DEI ban, what that does is you take all of our sales and they dwindle down and then those companies get to say ‘oh, your products are not performing and they can remove them from the shelves and then put their preferred businesses on the shelves,” Brown continues, encouraging her followers to “be smart” and shop only the Black-owned brands at Target. “Don’t allow foolishness to take us into separation… I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you as a business owner what we still need.” 

One thing we’re not going to do is make Tabitha Brown the villain in this scenario. To be clear, she is a Black woman small business owner dealing with a massive betrayal by these corporations and reacting in real time. There are parts of her plea (and her subsequent clarification, which basically said the same thing) I don’t agree with, but I also understand exactly where she is coming from. She is trying to change the system from within, using what’s available to her to succeed. This is the mentality we were raised on. If we work hard enough and are excellent enough, we will be rewarded by being accepted. The playing field will be levelled. If we just keep working, keep hustling, keep playing, eventually the game will go our way. It has to, right? Some of Brown’s commenters agreed. “We have to match the strategy with the outcome we want. In this case, boycotting may have the opposite effect (as you said here),” author Austin Channing Brown said under Tabitha Brown’s IG post. “What we want is for Target to keep us on shelves regardless of DEI … and that requires sales. So boycott if you must, but *boycott with intention* the products that are not Black owned. Keep buying Black.”

Again, I understand the sentiment and I agree that Black-owned brands shouldn’t suffer because of Target’s decision. But I wonder how long we can keep settling for scraps from a system set up so that our hard work can be stomped on at the whim of a tyrannical rich white man in office? How many times are we going to smile, put our heads down and keep doing the work in a capitalist system designed for us to always have a boot on our neck? “If you shop at Target, in any capacity, you are supporting Target in every capacity. The two cannot be separated,” academic Jessica Boro said in the comments of Brown’s post. “They make money off of every purchase. Period! So, even if you only support Black owned brands at Target… you are supporting the Target corporation. Your dollar has power. Be mindful!” 

Our dollars do have power and it makes a lot of sense to use that influence to send a message of dissatisfaction to these corporations. On X, Nina Turner laid out the intention of the “Strike for All” boycott and created a database of Black-owned brands to buy from directly instead of going through Target. “We can either send Target a clear message now, or be quiet & allow corporations [to] use allyship when it’s convenient,” she said, urging her followers to start the boycott on February 1. 

Whether you choose to boycott these brands or not (and the choice is absolutely yours), it’s good to see Black folks organizing and refusing to accept the discrimination that this administration is intent on weaving into the fabric of every decision they make and every executive order they pass. It’s also important to remember the impact of Trump’s attack on DEI. This isn’t just about getting your fave Black-owned haircare at your local Target. It’s about the Republican agenda to push back against progress. It’s about creating a social environment where a Black Olympian can’t say she went to Harvard without a slew of comments discrediting her education. It’s about wanting to be able to blame everything, including the LA fires, on “DEI”. It’s about bastardizing the very essence of “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” so that we spend so much time debating its intention and fighting with each other over boycotts that we are distracted from the rights being stripped away with every “Donald J. Trump” signature. 

It’s been a little over a week. If you’ve spent more than one of the past 10 days screaming into a pillow or crying yourself to sleep (just me?) over the blatant bigotry of this administration, you aren’t alone. If you’re a Black business owner, or someone who works in diversity, equity, and inclusion and are overcome with feelings of hopelessness and frustration, you are not alone. But the only way we get through this, just like our ancestors did, is through organizing and coming together. This is just the beginning of the fight on the right against DEI and there’s so much more to unpack, which is why next week Unbothered is kicking off our Black History Month package, a series of stories rolling out all month, focused on DEI. Now is not the time to give up. It’s only been a week.