Amid the COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter chaos of June 2020, Brett Craig was ousted as the chief creative officer from the largest ad agency on the West Coast. He wrote an email in response to a voice casting recommendation from a member of his team: “Not so urban.” His point was that the voice felt stereotypically “black” and that this particular voice would read as racist and pandering.
But that summer, it was posted on Instagram as an indictment. A nothing email, held on to for five years, was opportunistically blasted in the heat of the BLM riots to paint Craig as an unrepentant racist.
Craig was ushered out the door just a few days later, after eight years as a loyal employee who delivered results. The company had done its penance and sacrificed one of its own.
In the summer of 2020, companies across the country denounced their own complicity in furthering racism and the murder of George Floyd. Executives were frantic that if they failed to exhibit enough piety for the moment and allegiance to the cause, they would be ousted and their companies canceled.
They weren’t wrong. Stories of cancellation were everywhere. Adam Rapoport, editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit magazine at the time, was hate-bombed on social media with claims of refusing to review Puerto Rican cuisine. It was a pile-on. And Rapoport had to go.
Executives hoping to avoid a similar fate instructed marketing teams to fill Instagram with black squares replete with phrases such as “We vow to do better” and a laundry list of commitments including hiring a head of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The posts would always end with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, the catchphrase indicating loyalty to the cause.
By June 2020, if you didn’t announce your loyalty to the BLM movement, you were a racist. Companies abandoned their typical and necessary focus on the products they must sell to drive revenue and pay employees in order to prostrate themselves to the demands of a vicious mob.
The BLM mob included anyone who saw the moment as a chance to assert power. Members were aggressively proselytizing and gaining status as social justice warriors.
Company leaders were no exception, except they weren’t true believers. They were just hoping to transform their image as greedy capitalists and make a little more money by marketing their companies as “woke.”
The mob was vicious if you didn’t comply. In August 2020, a woman sitting outside eating dinner at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., was confronted by a group of angry protesters demanding she raise her fist in solidarity with the BLM movement. She refused, despite, she says, supporting the cause. The protesters, appearing to be mostly white, shouted at her, “White silence is violence.”
That was what passed for normal in the summer of 2020. And now, four years later, companies are abandoning their black square commitments.
So far, Tractor Supply, John Deere, Molson Coors, Ford Motor Company, Lowe’s, and Harley Davidson have publicly abandoned their DEI programs. Other larger companies have partially abandoned their programs: Microsoft cut DEI roles, and Starbucks removed DEI requirements from management bonuses.
Why? Some have moved away from DEI due to public pressure. Influencer Robby Starbuck has started a social media campaign of equal force to those initiated in 2020 by the BLM caucus. He is publicly shaming all-American companies that have DEI practices in play, and he has targeted good old American brands for a reason. Their fans and consumers reject these policies as un-American.
DEI is not merit-based. Some would argue that at its core it is communist, prioritizing equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. The accompanying policies are also censorious, aggressively implementing speech codes and limiting freedom of speech while administering compelled speech, such as pronouns in an email sign-off.
Employees’ speech can even be monitored outside of work, according to the “speech is violence” DEI crowd. Tom Goodwin, the head of insight for advertising company Publicis Groupe, was fired in August 2020 for statements he made about COVID-19 on Twitter as a private citizen.
Starbuck is smart to focus on classic American brands with fans who are more likely to hold “traditional values” such as “work hard, get ahead.” But in the summer of 2020, we were told that merit is racist.
Other companies are moving away from DEI because of legal challenges. Williams Sonoma, the Bay Area-based home furnishing company, was slapped with a complaint from America First Legal over aggressive DEI hiring practices including hiring based on sex and race.
As CEOs and C-suiters fear Starbuck and AFL coming for them and driving negative publicity, they are also, I suspect, relieved to walk away from these distractions.
Here’s what happens when a company implements DEI: It hires huge numbers of “practitioners” within human resources, often doubling the size of the HR department. These employees do not generate revenue — they implement “trainings” for all employees that take time away from core business responsibilities such as making great product. These trainings serve to scare employees into silence with their policing of language, and there is a pronounced chilling effect in employee interactions — people are afraid that words they uttered yesterday will be fireable offenses today. So, they keep their mouths shut.
This is not good for creativity and innovation. It is not good for American business. And now, woke capitalism is on the downswing.
CEOs know it is bad for business. They implemented it under duress. They feared for their own jobs. So, they fell in line out of self-preservation, not any true commitment to the cause.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
When business is tough, the last thing CEOs want is costly employees who don’t benefit the bottom line, and who only harm it by eating up earnings without generating sales. The first to be laid off are always the ones who aren’t generating revenue. And letting these DEI folks go gives everyone else the time to focus on the business again.
Left-leaning media can position the wave of DEI abandonment as the result of a PR terrorist campaign from “conservative” activists such as Starbuck. But it’s not that. Or not only that. If CEOs were convinced these policies had worked to build the businesses they lead, they’d fight to keep them. But they know they haven’t worked. And everyone wants to get back to business.
Jennifer Sey is a USA champion gymnast, the producer of the 2020 Emmy-winning documentary Athlete A on Netflix, and the founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.