Over the past few days and months, a host of US corporations, including Amazon, McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, John Deere and Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), announced end of their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. It will reduce initiatives aimed at promoting fair treatment and the “full” participation of their staff, particularly those from minority groups (ie gender, race, LGBTQ, Indigenous and disability groups).
Adopted over the past decade and a half, and amplified following protests across the US following police abuse and the 2020 killing of George Floyd, these corporate initiatives have included integrating DEI into hiring practices and supplier selection, most often through “unconscious bias” employee training.
The purported reason for this business change of heart according to DEI is that, as Amazon said, now “outdated”. But we should not be fooled; there is significant business logic behind it.
The timing of the announcement by a number of major corporations reveals their calculation that DEI is no longer beneficial to their brands. Faced with a growing backlash from American conservatives against corporate efforts to appeal to minorities, the likes of Meta and Amazon know full well that the incoming Trump regime heralds the end of an era of social “progressivism.”
Abolishing the DEI is therefore not only a way to mend relations with Trump, who has been a fierce critic of fairness, but also to adapt corporate marketing strategies to the approach of right-wing conservatism in the US. “Wokeism” is definitely out.
Eliminating the DEI will also be a cost-saving measure for doing business: US companies are estimated to spend approx 8 billion dollars annually to capital initiatives.
But the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this corporate flipflop is that there never was any principled commitment to capital. Companies adopted DEI not to solve social inequality, but to build a brand, that is, to build a corporate image to sell more products. That time has now passed.
However, the short shelf life of DEI should not surprise us. Let’s not forget that corporate capitalism is based on socioeconomic inequality—a hierarchy between small elites of shareholders who own and control productive assets and a massive, waged workforce, which today includes armies of mostly sweatshop workers in the Global South on which powerful branded corporations are crucially dependent. on.
DEI is therefore a way of putting a human face on corporate inequality. The often symbolic inclusion of minorities under the guise of “fairness” creates the illusion of creating greater equality. But it wasn’t and isn’t.
Several analysts have blasted corporate DEI for creating a billion-dollar “diversity industry” of studios, coaches and “diversity czars” while doing nothing to address inequality. The agenda of corporate capital is thus accused of being an exercise in window dressing – an ideological cloak – that may make us feel better, but fools us that by simply including a few more minorities in the workforce and management (mostly in the Global North), we reduce inequality.
In fact, the opposite is the case: wealth and income inequality around the world has increased sharply over the past two decades, particularly in the US.
So if equity was little more than branding or corporate cover for inequality, what can we expect now that DEI has been abandoned? In Meta’s recent announcement, we glimpse the answer that, in addition to getting rid of DEI, he also abolition of fact-checking on all its platforms.
Instead, a “community notes” system similar to the one used by X, where community members identify false claims, will replace fact-checking, which, remember, was intended precisely to protect against misinformation and extreme prejudice against minority groups.
The idea, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is to return to “freedom of expression,” despite the fact that since Elon Musk’s takeover of X and the rejection of fact-checking, hate speech, sexual and racial abuse, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have grown on the platform.
Therefore, the repeal of DEI, just like the scrapping of fact-checking, will bring further relief to the inequality (and inequity) upon which corporate capitalism is based. If DEI puts a human face on this inequality, its abandonment will make the inequality even more stark: corporations will now be less hesitant to continue engaging in hiring and procurement practices that privilege the already privileged.
Wokeism is out. Congestion is present. Meanwhile, inequality continues unabated.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
