From Performative to Passive: The Corporate Retreat from Equity

Image via CNBC

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In an era where social justice language once saturated corporate slogans and university mission statements, a quiet retreat is now underway. Across the U.S., major institutions are scaling back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) commitments—offices are dissolving, budgets are shrinking, and public statements are vanishing. What was once presented as an ethical imperative is now, for many, a political liability.

More and more corporations are rolling back their promises to DEI in the workforce. While framed as a trend toward political neutrality, these actions are far from neutral. They signal a broader shift in the relationship between politics, power, and institutional responsibility—one where silence is the new strategy, and risk management replaces reform.

In 2020, the death of George Floyd sparked corporations to publicly denounce racism and commit to improving internal diversity. The nationwide protests that followed launched a cultural reckoning, one that prompted companies to reevaluate their hiring practices, workplace cultures, and public values. From donation pledges to revised recruitment strategies, the momentum toward equity felt tangible—even if uneven.

This cultural shift quickly turned into a political one. The Biden Administration sought to institutionalize DEI through executive orders and federal policy, establishing goals to improve race and gender representation within the federal workforce while encouraging similar benchmarks in the private sector. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was tasked with redoubling their efforts to ensure that these goals extended beyond rhetoric and into structural change.

But that momentum began to fade. The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) struck down race-conscious admissions in higher education, creating legal and political ripple effects across sectors. 

The 2024 election of Donald Trump has continued these regressive changes. Within his first 60 days, Trump released two executive orders targeting DEI, directing the EEOC to investigate so-called “illegal DEI” programs. Framed as a defense against reverse discrimination, this policy signaled to companies that previously celebrated diversity that these programs might now pose legal and reputational risks.

Faced with this pressure, corporations began to reassess. A 2024 New York Times analysis of corporate filings found a marked decrease in references to DEI, with many firms eliminating explicit diversity language from public documents. Instead, companies now refer to “belonging,” “employee wellness,” or “inclusive culture” to avoid politically charged framing.

This shift is more than semantics. It reveals the conditional nature of corporate activism and exposes a familiar pattern: when the political winds change, companies follow. The speed and scale of this retreat suggest that many of the post-2020 pledges were more reactive than transformative, more to maintain brand image than instill actual equity values.

In this light, the rollback of DEI is not just a strategic pivot, rather, it’s an indictment of corporate accountability itself. Companies, bound primarily to their shareholders, rarely maintain moral commitments when those commitments threaten profitability or invite federal scrutiny. The performative aspect of corporate DEI was never a substitute for systemic change.

Ultimately, the rollback of DEI underscores a central tension in American politics: whether justice can ever be institutionalized in spaces that are not built to prioritize it. As DEI is rebranded or removed altogether, the work of creating equitable systems becomes more difficult but incredibly necessary. The challenge now is not just to revive the language of diversity, but to build frameworks that endure beyond performative gestures in order to maintain accountable, systemic changes.

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This article was edited by Abigail D’Angelo.