Target Drops DEI Goals and Ends Program to Boost Black Suppliers
Sarah Nassauer, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2025
Target one of the most full-throated corporate supporters of Black and LGBTQ rights, changed its tune Friday.
Its stores once featured prominent displays of themed merchandise for Pride Month and Black History Month. And after the 2020 murder of George Floyd a few miles from the company’s Minnesota headquarters, the retailer committed to increase the representation of Black employees across the company and spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025.
The retail giant Friday said it was ending those workforce and supplier diversity programs, after paring back its Black- and LGBT-themed merchandise in 2023.
Target joins a flood of companies retreating from their diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies under pressure from activists and from the new Trump administration. {snip}
Target said it would end the workforce diversity targets it established three years ago, including a pledge to increase the representation of Black employees across the company by 20%. {snip}
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Racial equity became an important theme inside Target after George Floyd’s murder. One of Target’s oldest stores in South Minneapolis was damaged in the uprising that followed his death. Target hosted an employee listening session attended by 7,000 employees. The store reopened in late 2020 in a ceremony attended by Chief Executive Brian Cornell.