Image via theHRDirector
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In the wake of widespread racial justice protests across the United States in 2020, many corporations and other private institutions made public commitments to promoting racial justice, and particularly to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within their workplaces. For example, the number of corporate professionals on LinkedIn with diversity-related job titles, such as chief diversity and inclusion officer or diversity and inclusion manager, rapidly increased in 2020 and peaked in 2021.
However, many corporations are now walking back DEI commitments and initiatives, particularly in the wake of President Trump’s executive order terminating all such initiatives within federal government agencies and pressure on corporations from federal regulatory agencies to end DEI programs. Among them are some of the largest corporations and employers in the nation, including Target, Amazon, Meta, McDonalds, Walmart, Google, and Goldman Sachs. Many of these corporations maintained verbal commitments to the importance of diversity and inclusion as they walked back their support for various programs and initiatives.
Target, for example, said it would conclude diversity, equity and inclusion goals it previously set in three-year cycles, including commitments to hire and promote more women and more people of color and to recruit more suppliers owned by people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, veterans and people with disabilities, maintaining that the decision to conclude these goal setting cycles was motivated by Target’s commitment to having “inclusive work and guest environments that welcome all.”
Amazon, similarly, removed specific sections titled ‘Equity for Black People’ and ‘LGBTQ+ Rights’ from their Our Position webpage, which details the company’s stances on social and political issues, replacing them a single paragraph on diversity, equity and inclusion, in which Amazon says it is committed “to creating a diverse and inclusive company.”
This raises the question: What real effects have these policies had in the few years that companies have been committed to them, if they can be so easily and quickly rolled back to align with the preferences of a new presidential administration? What do these commitments to “a diverse and inclusive company” or “inclusive work and guest environments” actually mean when these corporations are discontinuing the programs and initiatives they created to address injustices against racial and sexual minorities within their companies?
The answers to these questions lie in what DEI commitments, and the documentation of them, actually do with an institution, which often is not what the documents say they do. In her 2007 article “‘You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing’: Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation,” writer and scholar Sara Ahmed unpacks a series of interviews with diversity and equal opportunities officers from ten universities in the United Kingdom. She describes how the Race Relations Act Amendment in 2000 imposed a new ‘statutory’ duty on all public authorities to promote racial equality.
The first of the specific duties under this general duty for UK universities was to prepare a written statement. The process of nominating someone to write the document, writing the document, publishing and advertising it, and announcing the publication of it allowed a university to perform its commitment to racial equality. “[These documents] are ways in which universities perform an image of themselves,” particularly the image of ‘doing well’ as a university, Ahmed says. Under a particular law or within a particular political climate, a commitment to racial equality becomes a feature or trait of an institution (whether university or corporation) that is doing a good job, being the kind of institution that it is supposed to be.
When diversity and equality become ‘things’ that can be measured, it incentivizes institutions to produce auditable, measurable results (in the form of documentation) in order to perform the image of being committed to racial equality. Even documents, such as a university’s self-assessment of racial equality on their campus or a corporation’s report on its diversity, equity and inclusion goals, “that documented the racism of the university [become] usable as a measure of good performance,” says Ahmed. Such documents come to represent the institution’s due diligence, which can impede real action combating institutional racism; recognizing the problem becomes equated with solving it.
This is not to say that commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion are useless or should be done away with. Rather, these commitments have to be a starting point, not an end in themselves. Commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion in response to documented racism or disparities in racial representation within an institution are not enough, by themselves, but, as Ahmed’s interviewees describe, they can be used to argue for changes within the institution. However, when we see commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion being so easily and quickly rolled back, it is clear they were never going to be enough on their own to meaningfully affect change within these corporations.
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This article was edited by Abigail D’Angelo.
Nathan Wellman 
Javeer Khan 
Nadia Garriga