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diversity equity inclusion
Walmart's DEI Rollback is Dangerous for Workers Like Me
That's why I'm calling on shareholders to step up.
Jun 05, 2025
For nearly seven years, I’ve clocked in and out at a Walmart in Memphis, Tennessee, where I stock shelves, help customers, and push myself through double shifts to make ends meet. Like so many of my colleagues, I’ve poured my time and energy into this company, and also like so many of them, that hard work has gone unnoticed.
I have more than 15 years of managerial retail experience, but I still find it extremely difficult to advance at Walmart. As a Black woman, this is unfortunately not a unique experience, especially at Walmart. Even though I’ve been working for the company for years, people who look like me are rarely given opportunities for growth. Management will keep you at the cash register for decades, with little hope for a raise or a promotion.
So when Walmart announced it was joining the wave of corporations that are rolling back their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, it felt like a punch to the gut, and makes me question if I still belong here.
While Walmart executives are granting themselves multi-million dollar raises, the Black and brown workers who make their company successful are struggling.
Walmart is the single largest private employer of Black workers in the United States, and as the biggest retailer in the country, Walmart is granted the opportunity to set the standard for other retailers across the nation. Their policies don’t just influence what happens inside its stores — they shape the lives of millions of working families across this country.
Nationwide, more than half of Walmart associates are women and people of color, yet the majority of leadership roles still go to white men.
But it’s not just limited opportunities for growth that are stifling Black Walmart employees. I can tell you from my experience, and the conversations I’ve had with colleagues, that inequities are taking place at stores across the country. We see who gets promoted and who doesn’t. Which employees get steady work hours, and which get sent home early by their managers. We see who gets ignored, and who gets a voice.
These discrepancies in how Walmart associates are treated too often seem to fall along racial and gender lines.
DEI initiatives were created to address these very problems by helping to promote fair treatment and put an end to racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. These are policies created to ensure everyone has a fair shot, and that every worker is treated with respect and dignity.
This common sense framework benefits not just workers, but also a company’s long-term success. A diverse and inclusive workplace is a stronger workplace. When employees feel valued and see opportunities for growth, regardless of their race or background, they are much more engaged, productive, and loyal.
With DEI now cast aside, Walmart workers are feeling the opposite. We feel left behind, jaded, and betrayed.
But shareholders have a powerful opportunity to step up and support Walmart's workforce. In June, I’ll be presenting a shareholder proposal, alongside United for Respect Education Fund, calling for a third-party independent racial equity audit at Walmart.
This proposal is not about pointing fingers. Instead it’s about seeking truth, accountability, and transparency so that we can begin to actually change the culture at Walmart.
For years, Walmart has stated its commitment to diversity and inclusion, and an audit would provide an objective assessment of whether these commitments translate into real equity within the company.
We cannot sit by as Walmart makes hollow promises, and we cannot roll back the clock on workplace equality. While Walmart executives are granting themselves multi-million dollar raises, the Black and brown workers who make their company successful are struggling. Walmart has the ability to level the playing field by setting the gold standard for employee treatment. This is a company that not only can afford to do better, but has a moral obligation to do better.
The proposal sends a clear message: we need transparency, accountability, and a genuine commitment to racial equity that goes beyond words. As someone who has dedicated years to this company, I urge shareholders to stand with the workers who make them profitable, and ensure that accountability isn’t lost with Walmart's abandonment of DEI.
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Trump and Co Are Doing Their Best to Make America White Again (As If It Ever Was!)
Along with overlapping groups, including immigrants, transgender and other LGBTQ+ folks, women, and union workers, Black Americans are clear targets for this administration.
May 21, 2025
On May 5, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute held its annual fundraising gala. The event showcases the extraordinary imaginations of people who design exorbitant clothes and the gutsiness of those who dare (and can afford) to wear them.
I’m dimly aware of this annual extravaganza because of my interest in knitting, spinning, and weaving—the crafts involved in turning fluff into yarn and yarn into cloth. Mind you, I have no flair for fashion myself. I could never carry off wearing the simplest of ballgowns, and I’m way too short to rock a tuxedo. My own personal style runs to 1970s White Dyke. (Think blue jeans and flannel shirts.) But I remain fascinated by what braver people will get themselves up in.
One of my favorite movies is Paris Is Burning, a 1990 documentary about the underground Harlem ballroom scene, where drag queens and transgender folks, mostly Black and Latina, recreated a fierce version of the world of haute couture. It was a testament to people’s ability to take the detritus of what systems of racism and economic deprivation had given them and spin it into defiant art.
So I was excited to learn that the theme of this year’s gala was to be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” an homage to the tradition of Black dandyism, about which Vogue magazine writes:
There is something undeniably magnetic about the sharp creases of a tailored suit, the gleam of polished leather shoes, the swish of a silk pocket square. But for Black dandyism, this isn’t just about looking good—it’s a declaration. A defiant reclaiming of space in a world that has long sought to define and confine Black identity. So, what exactly is Black dandyism? At its core, it’s a fashion revolution, a movement steeped in history, resistance, and pride.
The Met’s gala theme was chosen back in October 2024, when it still seemed possible that, rather than electing a fascist toddler, this country might choose a Black woman as president. In that case, the gala could have served as an extended victory toast. (As it happens, Kamala Harris did in fact attend.)
Instead, this country is today laboring under an increasingly authoritarian regime in Washington, one proudly and explicitly dedicated to reversing decades of victories by various movements for Black liberation.
Resuscitating Employment Discrimination
I wrote “laboring under” quite intentionally, because one of one of Trump 2.0’s key attacks on African Americans comes in the realm of work. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in its ominous preelection document Mandate for Change made this clear in a chapter on the Labor Department. The first “needed reform” there, it insisted, would be to uproot DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts wherever they might be found in the government and military. Its authors wrote that the new administration must:
Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution. Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views. The next administration should eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects.
In case the reader has any doubt about the evils attributed to DEI, that chapter’s next “needed reform” made it clear that the greatest of those horrors involved any effort whatsoever to prevent racial discrimination against people of color. To that end, Project 2025 wanted the federal government to stop collecting racial demographics in employment. It called on the next administration to eliminate altogether the gathering of such data by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on the grounds that collecting “employment statistics based on race/ethnicity… can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.”
In other words, as I wrote months before Donald Trump returned to power, “If you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you are enjoined from collecting data about race and employment), then there is no racial discrimination to remedy.”
The 1964 Civil Rights Act first established the EEOC’s mandate to collect such employment data by race in its Title VII, the section on employment rights. Title VII remains a major target of the second Trump administration. That’s especially true when it comes to federal employment, where all federal agencies are required “to maintain an affirmative program of equal employment”—an idea abhorred by the Trump administration.
The employment-rights section of the Civil Rights Act covers all employers, including the federal government. And in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson went even further, issuing Executive Order 11246, which applied similar principles to the employment practices of federal contractors. That order established the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), which uses the EEOC’s data to ensure that federal contractors don’t discriminate against what are considered protected classes of workers.
Not surprisingly, Project 2025 called on the next administration to rescind Executive Order 11246, which is precisely what President Donald Trump did on January 21, 2025, his second day in office, in an order entitled (apparently without irony) “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” (To be clear, by “illegal discrimination,” Trump, of course, meant imagined “discrimination” against white people.) In addition to eliminating that mandate, Trump’s order also rescinded a number of later executive orders meant to ensure racial equity in employment, including:
(i) Executive Order 12898 of February 11, 1994 (Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations);
(ii) Executive Order 13583 of August 18, 2011 (Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce);
(iii) Executive Order 13672 of July 21, 2014 (Further Amendments to Executive Order 11478, Equal Employment Opportunity in the Federal Government, and Executive Order 11246, Equal Employment Opportunity); and
(iv) The Presidential Memorandum of October 5, 2016 (Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce).
According to Project 2025, preventing “discrimination” against whites requires another move as well: eliminating any law or policy that prohibits discriminatory employment outcomes. In other words, intentional racial discrimination, which is often impossible to prove, would remain the only legitimate form of discrimination.
Decimating the Black Middle Class
Why have I made such a detailed excursion into the weeds of federal law and policymaking? Because the real-world effects on African American communities of such arcane maneuvering will likely be staggering.
Federal employment was a crucial factor in building today’s Black middle class, beginning in the decades after emancipation and accelerating significantly under the provisions of that 1964 Civil Rights Act and the various presidential orders that followed. As Danielle Mahones of the Berkeley Labor Center of the University of California points out, “Federal employment has been a pathway to the middle class for African American workers and their families since Reconstruction, including postal work and other occupations.” We can now expect, she adds, “to see Black workers lose their federal jobs.”
The Trump administration’s apparently race-neutral attack on supposed waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce is guaranteed to disproportionately remove Black workers from federal employment.
And with Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024, that indeed is the plan that has been brought to the White House by Russell Vought, one of the key architects of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget. Implementation began with the series of executive orders already described, which largely govern the hiring of new employees. But actions affecting federal hiring don’t take effect quickly, especially in periods of government cutbacks like we’re seeing today.
Fortunately for Vought and his co-conspirators at the Heritage Foundation, Trump had another option in his anti-Black toolbox: the chainsaw wielded by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. While estimates vary, the best estimate is that, thanks to Musk and crew, around 260,000 federal workers have by now “been fired, taken buyouts, or retired early.”
Eliminating federal employees in such a way has indeed had a disproportionate effect on Black workers, since they comprise almost 19% of that workforce, while the country’s total workforce is only 13% Black. (At the Post Office, the figure may be closer to 30%.) If 260,000 federal workers have lost their jobs under Trump and Musk, then almost 50,000 of them may be Black. In other words, cutting federal jobs disproportionately affects Black workers.
“Negro Removal”
Of course, Donald Trump’s approach to Blacks is hardly new in this country. “Negro removal” has a long history here. When I first moved to San Francisco in the late 1970s, there was a big blank area in the middle of the city. Acres of empty blocks sat in the section of town known as the “Western Addition” or, to the people who had once lived there, “the Fillmore.” The Fillmore had been a racially mixed neighborhood. Populated by Japanese- and Filipino-Americans, it had also housed a significant Black enclave. As a local NPR podcast described the scene, “If you were walking down San Francisco’s Fillmore Street in the 1950s, chances are you might run into Billie Holiday stepping out of a restaurant. Or Ella Fitzgerald trying on hats. Or Thelonious Monk smoking a cigarette.” The neighborhood was often called the “Harlem of the West.”
But “urban renewal” projects, initiated under the federal Housing Act of 1949, would tear down over 14,000 housing units and an unknown number of businesses there in the name of “slum clearance and community redevelopment.” By the time I arrived, however, much of the Fillmore had been rebuilt, including the Japantown business area, though many empty lots remained. Today, they’ve all been filled in, but the 10% of the city’s population that had been African American when “urban renewal” began has been halved. And while Blacks still represent 5% of the city’s population, they also account for 37% of the unhoused.
The writer and activist James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963, while the Fillmore’s razing was in full swing. “Urban renewal,” he pointed out, “is Negro removal.” And according to Mindy T. Fullilove, a professor of urban studies and health, San Francisco’s urban renewal experience was duplicated across the country. As she put it back in 2001:
[U]rban renewal affected thousands of communities in hundreds of cities. Urban renewal was to achieve “clearance” of “blight” and “slum” areas so that they could be rebuilt for new uses other than housing the poor… The short-term consequences were dire, including loss of money, loss of social organization, and psychological trauma.
As Fullilove argued, federal policies like urban renewal, involving “community dispossession—and its accompanying psychological trauma, financial loss, and rippling instability—produced a rupture in the historical trajectory of African American urban communities.” She believes that such federal intervention foreclosed the possibility that Black people would follow the route to full participation in U.S. social, commercial, and political life taken by “earlier waves of immigrants to the city.”
Policies that appear to be “race neutral” can have racialized effects. The phrase “urban renewal” says nothing about uprooting Black communities, yet that is what it achieved in practice. Just as earlier federal policies led to the removal of Black communities from the hearts of hundreds of U.S. cities, the Trump administration’s apparently race-neutral attack on supposed waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce is guaranteed to disproportionately remove Black workers from federal employment. Together with the planned ejection of millions of immigrants, and following the Project 2025 playbook, Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions like Stephen Miller are doing their best to Make America White Again. (As if it ever was!)
Text and Subtext
The second time around, Trump’s administration sees race everywhere. It’s the subtext of almost everything its officials say and it’s right there in the “text” of its actions and pronouncements.
Ironically enough, Mindy Fullilove’s article is—for the moment—still available from the National Institutes of Health library website. Given the “Negro removal” that the Trump administration has been eagerly pursuing on its thousands of websites and libraries, though, who knows how long it will remain there. Certainly, you can expect to see further erasures of African Americans from any arena this administration enters. As Washington Post columnist Theodore T. Johnson writes,
Not only does this White House see race; it is also a preoccupation: One of its first executive orders enacted an anti-diversity agenda that purged women, people of color, and programs from federal websites and libraries. Trump directed the firing of multiple generals and admirals who are Black, female, or responsible for the military following the rule of law.
Recent weeks have seen the purging (and in some cases, embarrassed restoration) of any number of Black historical figures, including Jackie Robinson, Harriet Tubman, and the Tuskegee Airmen, from government websites.
Nor are attacks on employment and representation the new administration’s only attempts to constrain the lives of African Americans. On April 28, Trump issued an executive order devoted to “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” In addition to “unleashing” local law enforcement, the order prepares the way for military involvement in local policing. It also seeks to roll back consent decrees governing the behavior of police departments judged discriminatory by previous Justice Departments. In 2025, no one should be confused about the respective races of the “criminals” and “innocent citizens” referred to in Trump’s order.
So yes, along with overlapping groups, including immigrants, transgender and other LGBTQ+ folks, women, and union workers, Black Americans are clear targets for this administration. That’s why even as rarified an event as the Met Gala may be, it still inspires me. As Ty Gaskins wrote in Vogue, Black style is a “defiant reclaiming of space in a world that has long sought to define and confine Black identity.”
Isn’t it now time for all of us to reclaim our space—and nation—from Donald Trump?
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Charter-Cox $34.5 Billion Megamerger the 'Last Thing' Consumers Need: Watchdog
"However troubling as this merger might be for competition, at least as troubling is what the companies might agree to in order to persuade the Trump administration and the current FCC to approve the deal."
May 16, 2025
Charter Communications and Cox Communications on Friday announced a $34.5 billion merger that—if approved by the Trump administration—would create the largest cable television and broadband provider by subscribers in the United States, sparking a flurry of monopoly concerns.
Charter, which uses the branding Spectrum, is already the second-largest publicly traded cable company, but coupling with the privately held Cox would push it ahead of the current industry leader, Comcast. According to a statement from the cable giants, the combined company would be known as Cox Communications, with Spectrum as the consumer-facing brand.
"The last thing American consumers need is yet another megamerger, as giant internet service providers and cable companies claim they need to get yet-larger to keep up with their industry peers," said John Bergmayer, legal director at the watchdog Public Knowledge, in a Friday statement.
"More consolidation won't fix the cable industry, and introducing new sets of competitive problems is no way to address existing ones," he continued. "As always with cable mergers, the question is as much a loss of opportunities for content creators and programmers to reach an audience, as the loss of choices to subscribers."
As NBC News—whose parent company is Comcast—reported:
On a Friday call with investors, Charter CEO Chris Winfrey called the deal "good for America" and said it will "return jobs from overseas and create new, good-paying customer service and sales careers."
The commentary comes as corporate deal activity has been slower than expected since President Donald Trump took office.
After Trump won the election, Wall Street rallied as many expected the regulatory environment to loosen and the floodgates to open for dealmakers and corporate leaders. But in the months following the election, companies have been contending with other factors rather than dealmaking, such as the Federal Communications Commission's investigation into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, and the outcome of Trump's tariffs.
The Charter-Cox deal could face scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr. Journalist George Chidi said on social media that "in a sane world, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division and the FCC would block the merger of Cox Communications and Charter."
"Do I need to even complete this thought?" Chidi asked. "For the next three years and six months—assuming we are still having actual elections, it's corporate Christmas."
Public Knowledge's Bergmayer said that "however troubling as this merger might be for competition, at least as troubling is what the companies might agree to in order to persuade the Trump administration and the current FCC to approve the deal."
Trump has a long record of forcefully going after his critics, and experts—including Daniel Stockemer, a professor at Canada's University of Ottawa, in a commentary published earlier this month in the journal Politics & Policy—have warned that with his second term, the president is pushing the United States toward autocracy.
"Will the companies drop cable channels critical of this administration, or agree to censor online content or sites that the administration disapproves of—something the loss of Title II and net neutrality makes all the more likely?" Bergmayer wondered. "Given FCC Chairman Carr's proven willingness to use the agency's power to 'further the president's agenda,' and the willingness of companies to agree to get deals done, what could once be dismissed as paranoid speculation becomes frighteningly plausible."
"From walking back—even reversing—company policies designed to promote diversity and inclusion, to pulling back on news coverage critical of the administration, far too many companies have already put the short-term interest of currying favor with the White House over the public interest, and over the interests of their employees and the communities they serve," he added. "Hopefully that does not happen here."
Emarketer analyst Ross Benes toldReuters that "antitrust concerns are legitimate. But in this era of deregulation, the merger would probably pass as long as they don't upset the president."
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