Apr. 16, 2025 |
‘A new dawn.’ On taking office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14151, ending federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Around the same time, a series of major U.S. companies, including McDonalds and Meta, binned their own DEI initiatives. As one top banker, who wished to remain nameless, put it to the Financial Times, “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”
Some, such as JP Morgan Chase, reaffirmed their commitment to DEI. But even so, executives have virtually stopped mentioning it during investment calls. Following the U.S. protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, corporate DEI initiatives peaked through 2021, but then companies halved the number of minority and women’s internship programs between 2022 and 2023.
Why were American corporate leaders so quick to embrace DEI—and then scrap it?
A look at Walter Benn Michaels’s and Adolph Reed Jr.’s No Politics but Class Politics.
—Gustav Jönsson
