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.”
