A few weeks ago, The New York Times reported that Goldman Sachs has decided to remove diversity considerations for board membership. The decision to reject even a nominal commitment to diversity is, according to the Times, the result of a deal Goldman struck with the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-wing anti-labor group that has spent years trying to eliminate any semblance of diversity initiatives in corporate America. Anti-equity infrastructure is strong, and getting stronger.
Goldman is far from alone. Over the past year, Meta terminated its DEI programs entirely, resulting in significant drops in Black and Latino hirings compared to others. Target slashed DEI funding and stopped tracking diversity metrics. Walmart, Amazon, and Paramount all scaled back or dismantled their commitments. Verizon eliminated all DEI-focused roles in its HR department. And in the federal government, more than 69,000 positions were cut by mid-2025, many tied to equity work and/or held by Black women in administrative, training, and human resources departments. To be clear: many companies are quietly continuing their diversity work. But the loudest signals are moving in the other direction.
Last year was the year of rollbacks. This year is shaping up to be the year of advancing discrimination. Corporations and institutions aren’t just stepping back from equity commitments, they are being given the incentive and the cover to actively exclude Black and Brown people without consequence.
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. Over the past year, political leaders and allied institutions have used every lever available—executive orders, legal threats, congressional pressure, coordinated right-wing campaigns, media smears—to make equity programs seem dangerous. And companies are responding the way companies always respond: calculating who has power over them. Right now, the forces demanding free-rein discrimination have more leverage than the forces demanding justice. That’s the problem we need to solve.
The right has been incredibly effective at denigrating equity policies, from popularizing terms like “Affirmative Action case” in Hollywood content to taking a divide-and-conquer approach to pitting people of color against one another in lawsuits and public policy fights.
To understand just how effective they’ve been, take one look at this video of one of the DOGE employees during a deposition in January. He's completely unable to provide even the simplest definition of a concept he and his department were tasked with eliminating. Yet, through the interview, he keeps marching according to the orders he was given, without question or pause. The forces of racial hierarchy have created an army ready to do their bidding, whether those soldiers understand what and who they’re fighting or not.
The Real cost of rollbacks
Let's talk about what's actually happening to people's lives. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the first half of 2025, more than 300,000 Black women were pushed out of the labor force entirely. Black unemployment overall stood at 8%, roughly double the white unemployment rate of 3.9%—a preventable inequity that has persisted for decades but that pro-equity programs were beginning, slowly, to address.
Research shows that 57% of companies that cut DEI initiatives reported declines in hiring rates for historically excluded groups. They dropped hiring women of color by 37%. They dropped hiring men of color by 33%. Meanwhile, the EEOC eliminated its use of disparate impact investigations, one of the most important legal tools that women and communities of color had to challenge discriminatory policies that hide behind neutral language. (Instead, the current head of the EEOC released this video, saying that white men who experienced discrimination at work based on their race or sex should file EEOC claims.)
We've seen what happens when we let equity rules disappear. Remember the Paycheck Protection Program created to help businesses avoid laying off people during COVID? There were no equity guardrails. Money was moving fast, the country was in a state of emergency, and the system operated on trust. And what happened? Banks overwhelmingly funneled relief funds to white-owned businesses. Black business owners were shut out. Not because of an explicit policy of exclusion, but because when there is nothing in place to ensure fairness, the default is discrimination.
It's hard to calculate the cost of that impact. Think about all the people whose first business would have launched their careers if they weren’t forced to shut it down. Think about all the employees they would have trained, who would have gone on to start something of their own or rise up the ranks of their field. Think about the downstream effect on families, on neighborhoods, and on generational wealth when local, Black-owned businesses disappear. That is what's at stake—not in theory, but in the concrete impact of what happens when guardrails come down.
The Equity Dam
The forces of white supremacy and racial discrimination are always building behind the dam. Equity policies are among the few controls holding them back. Of course, they can't hold them back entirely. But when you remove them, the flood rushes in. The PPP showed us that. The federal workforce cuts are showing us that now.
And on the other side of this, we can see who benefits. Unqualified people with no standards are being elevated through grift and cronyism. So it's not just that good people are being fired for no reason, it's also that the absence of standards means mediocrity and corruption fill the vacuum.
The rollback of equity isn't just about exclusion. It's about the expansion of unchecked privilege. (Nothing proves that more than the video of the DOGE bro above.)
This is not about one company or one policy. Defending and expanding opportunity requires more than asking companies to do the right thing. Just asking corporations to care about racial justice is not a winning strategy. Corporations respond to incentives. They respond to risk. They respond when their reputations, their bottom lines, or their standing with shareholders is at stake. Goldman's decision is the result of leveraged power, not principle.
It is possible for our side to leverage those incentives too. But leverage requires infrastructure. When we have the infrastructure to ensure that advancing racial equity reaps benefits, and to ensure that failing on that front leads to unbearable consequences, institutions behave differently. But when our opponents have that leverage, commitments fall to the wayside.
And here's the thing we have to be honest about: the wind is not at our back right now. There's a difference between people supporting equity in a poll and people being willing to fight for it. Too often, we confuse general support with motivation. We need people with a willingness to get out of their seat and actually do something. And when motivation is low, even small and simple attacks create enormous openings.
This isn't about one protest or one election. It's about whether we are building the kind of durable infrastructure—organizations, networks, and strategies—capable of holding powerful institutions accountable over time. It comes from coordinated consumer action, and from communities refusing to let corporations walk away from racial justice without consequence. Corporate behavior is not inevitable—it's responsive. And right now, it is responding to the wrong people.
Too many people still think of DEI as a fluff issue—something symbolic, something that can wait. That is a dangerous miscalculation. It is a concrete justice issue, as real as any fight over wages, housing, or civil rights—and, in fact, bound up in those fights. But it’s also something more: it’s a way in.
We’ve seen this playbook before. The right wing uses issues like this as an opening: testing how far they can go, seeing what they can get away with. And when we don’t stop it before it spirals, we end up dealing with far more pain than anyone anticipated. The attack on DEI is the front door to a much larger assault on the rights, protections, and opportunities that communities have fought for over generations. We are foolish to ignore it, and we cannot afford to organize as if anything less than our lives depends on stopping it.
And it can get worse. Imagine, for example, if philanthropy decided to fully follow suit—stepping back from DEI and issues of racial and gender equity just as the corporations are doing, just when we need more resources to stand up for it. This is the moment to double down, not retreat. If the forces fighting against equity are investing more, we need to be investing more, too.
I recently sat down with NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director-Counsel Janai Nelson, author Michael Harriot, and Global Black Economic Forum CEO Alphonso David for a Freedom Table conversation on NewsOne about exactly this—how attacks on DEI have moved across institutions, from federal agencies and universities to corporations and financial systems, and what fighting back actually looks like. We talked about how these efforts are connected, how they reshape incentives for powerful institutions, and why so many companies are quietly recalculating what they believe they can get away with.
The conversation, like the moment, demands that we meet this not simply with outrage, but with strategy—building the infrastructure, coordination, and sustained pressure to hold corporations and institutions accountable, and to ensure that the doors that have begun to open are not closed again…sometimes quietly.
I’m excited to be working on at least one new initiative aiming to support promising approaches—fortifying the momentum for equity that so many worked so hard to create, and battling the backlash currently underway—which I will share more about soon.
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