WORDS BY DIAMOND AGYEI AND ARMANDO-GABRIEL CHAVEZ
EDITED BY NATALIA GEVARA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BARBARA BURGESS
On the night of his second inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order declaring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives “illegal and immoral,” setting off the rapid elimination of DEI, accessibility for people with disabilities, and environmental justice programs from federal agencies. The private sector followed suit, with dozens of companies terminating the DEI policies they implemented in response to the 2020 protests against anti-Black police brutality, the largest in American history.
DEI did not begin with Biden. The affirmative action policies enacted after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have a throughline to contemporary DEI initiatives. Landmark legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act signaled a change in corporate culture, as diversity professionals sprouted like mushrooms in the 1990s, leading trainings on unconscious bias, sexual harassment, and cultural sensitivity into the 2010s. National attitudes towards the murder of Trayvon Martin, the #MeToo movement, and racist attacks against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic pushed American companies to incorporate more stringent policies of equity and inclusion. Companies like Target promised to focus on the “advancement” of Black employees in 2020, only to end its Racial Equity Action and Change initiative four days after Trump terminated DEI within the federal government.
American culture was hardly trapped by the “woke left.” Equity Action Plans didn’t hold for long. For the following companies, they didn’t even last half the decade.
Disney
2020
2020 was a year of controversy for the Disney corporation. Disney Plus launched in November the prior year, with thirty million downloads in the last two months of 2019 alone. Protests against anti-Black police brutality led to public outcry against representations of Black people throughout Disney’s catalog. In response, Disney added content warnings before films like Dumbo, Peter Pan, and The Jungle Book that read, “These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.” The message directed viewers to a website to learn more about Disney’s efforts towards inclusionary storytelling. Later in the year, one of Disney’s highly anticipated projects, the live-action Mulan, faced a boycott for filming in Xinjiang—where the Chinese government has arbitrarily detained over 1.8 million Uyghurs and ethnic Muslim minorities in internment camps— which the Trump administration in 2021 labeled a genocide. The film met further controversy when its lead, Liu Yifei, expressed support for the Hong Kong police during the pro-democracy protests of 2019 and 2020. As a result, “diversifying the work force” was a popular refrain for CEO Bob Iger in 2021. The company’s Reimagine Tomorrow campaign aimed to “[amplify] underrepresented voices and untold stories as well as [champion] the importance of accurate representation in media and entertainment.”
2025
In February, chief human resources officer Sonia Coleman circulated a memo to all Disney employees detailing the changes in the company’s DEI strategy, essentially scrubbing any semblance of the acronym by deleting “diversity” from performance metrics. Additionally, the company removed its content advisory disclaimers, and shut down its Reimagine Tomorrow initiative. Iger has since changed his tune on diversity, ensuring investors that Disney is “entertainment-driven, not agenda-driven.” It’s a similar remark made by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ in response to the censure of Hasan Minhaj’s comedy special critical of Saudi Arabia in 2019. Hastings claimed Netflix is “in the entertainment business, not the ‘truth to power business.’” While the Disney Company has significantly reduced its DEI initiatives, it hasn’t gone far enough for the Trump administration. Disney and ABC are under investigation from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on whether what remains of their DEI initiatives violate equal employment opportunity regulations.
META
2020
By 2020, violent right-wing extremists successfully weaponized Facebook as a recruitment tool. Misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests were exacerbated by President Trump’s own posts on the platform. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” wrote Trump on Facebook in May. By July, a growing list of companies, including Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Unilever, boycotted Facebook advertising because of their mishandling of hate speech and misinformation. Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s policies, citing freedom of speech and expression, and pivoted to content “warning labels” and its diversity goals as public relation damage control.
2025
Cut to Zuckerberg’s million-dollar check to Trump’s inauguration fund, and the end of Meta’s equity and inclusion programs—including the elimination of Meta’s chief diversity officer position, supplier diversity efforts, representation goals, and diverseslate hiring approach—days before Trump’s executive order. Soon after, it terminated its fact-checking program. This preemptive move signaled to the nation that one of the largest companies in the world is climbing into bed with MAGA, and with Project 2025 at large.
Target
2020
In Summer 2020, the Minneapolis-based retailer, Target, was under fire for limiting the hours of 200 stores—seventy in Minnesota alone— in response to storefronts near anti-police brutality protests being vandalized. Notably, a storefront three miles from where George Floyd was murdered by police, was closed for nearly five months. This directed attention toward Target’s collaborations with police, particularly the Target Forensic Services Laboratory, which “[lends] its high-end technology and professionals to law enforcement agencies free of charge,” and SafeZone, a “surveillance logistics” program. To smooth things over, on September 10, 2020, Target released their first Workforce Diversity Report, which disaggregated the demographics of all employees by race and gender. The company additionally claimed they would “increase representation” of Black team members by 20 percent in “three years” by prioritizing “advancement, retention, and hiring”.
2025
Four days after Trump’s second inauguration, Target announced the conclusion of a number of their DEI programs. To soften the blow, they stated: “Belonging for all is an essential part of our team and culture, helping fuel consumer relevance and business results.” They announced the cessation of their Racial Equity Action and Change (REACH) initiatives, their three-year DEI “goals,” and “all external diversity-focused surveys.” They also renamed their “Supplier Diversity” team to “Supplier Engagement.”
McDonald’s
2020
McDonald’s had a rough start in 2020. The chain hired a new CEO due to his predecessor’s exit following an inappropriate relationship with a female coworker. Two Black female executives filed a lawsuit against the chain in January 2020, alleging racial discrimination. In July, McDonald’s announced a partnership with the Mayo Clinic to strengthen their response to COVID-19, as well as plans to address racial bias in their hiring and supplying processes. However, in September 2020, fifty-two Black franchisees filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s for racial discrimination. Two months later, McDonald’s retitled their “Chief Diversity Officer” role to “Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer.”
2025
According to McDonald’s, everyone is “welcome under [their] Golden Arches;” everyone except DEI. In early 2025, the fast-food chain announced that they are “retiring setting aspirational representation goals,” nixing their “Supply Chain’s Mutual Commitment to DEI pledge,” renaming their “Diversity Team” the “Global Inclusion Team,” and ending external surveys. All of this was made public on January 6.
Amazon
2020
In June 2020, the big bad himself, Jeff Bezos, proclaimed that Black lives matter. He posted a screenshot of a racist email he received, claiming this was the “kind of customer [he’s] happy to lose.” Later that month, Amazon banned police use of their facial recognition software, Rekognition, for one year. Despite this seemingly coming from the kindness of Bezos’ heart in light of George Floyd’s horrific murder, Rekognition had been protested for years prior. In June 2018, sixty-seven civil rights organizations petitioned Bezos to cease providing Rekognition to the government. In November 2020, Amazon’s “aggressive” new diversity initiatives were leaked, including plans to double their Black executives in 2020 and 2021 and remove “non-inclusive” language from company documents.
2025
Amazon started early with their Trump-sanctioned DEI crackdown. In December 2024, Amazon’s VP of Inclusive Experiences and Technology sent an internal memo stating that the company would be “winding down outdated programs and materials.” In February 2025, Amazon removed references to diversity in their annual report. Their 2023 workforce data report says in big, bold text: “Representation matters…we know that diversity helps us build better teams.”
These overnight rollbacks serve as a reminder of how unreliable and structurally weak institutional DEI initiatives are, particularly in a fascist country dependent on reactionary policies. Turning racial justice into a numbers game was always bound to fail. Racial equity— especially for Black people— will not be achieved through increased access to either side of capitalist exploitation. We cannot rid our world of systemic oppression through false acceptance into these systems. Only by dismantling the capitalist institutional framework of America will everyone truly be free.
Diamond Agyei is a poet who occasionally partakes in journalism. When not writing, she watches slashers and melodramas, rants on Instagram @unsettlng, and contributes as an editor on horrorgirl.space.
Armando-Gabriel Chavez is a writer, journalist, and astrologer living in Brooklyn, where he listens to Sade every day. Find him on Bluesky at @Armando-Gabriel.
backmattermag.org 