Jamie Sarkonak: Walmart’s DEI retreat a major win for the common sense crowd

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Now that the largest employer in the United States — Walmart has 2.1 million employees, with 1.6 million of those in the U.S. — is retreating from many of the progressive political commitments it made circa 2020, it just became a heck of a lot easier for smaller fish to follow suit.

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Though Walmart boasted proudly about its progressive commitments over the years, the withdrawal has been quiet and unceremonious. Details about the corporation’s exit from diversity, equity and inclusion were made public by anti-DEI journalist/activist, Robby Starbuck, whose reports were confirmed later by Bloomberg and the Associated Press.

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The details: no longer will the retailer allow transgender-related or inappropriately sexual children’s products on its marketplace. No longer will it use the term “LatinX.” And no longer will racial equity training be imposed on staff.

Other changes include closing the curtain on its $100 million philanthropic program for Black people, reevaluating Pride funding (to ensure money isn’t being spent on sexual content for children) and reviewing its supplier diversity program (to make sure no supplier is actually being excluded on the basis of diversity).

If it follows through, Walmart’s new direction will be a clear departure from the current course. Its marketplace is currently home to books like “Not ‘Him’ or ‘Her’: Supporting My Non-Binary Child” and pronoun-instruction picture books for kids — time will tell if these will last. In the past, it’s deployed “LatinX,” the gender-deconstructionist word for “Latino/Latina” which Latinos and Latinas tend to revile, in official back-patting philanthropy-related communications.

Walmart even had its executives take a racial nonsense training program, according to whistleblower documents obtained by CityJournal, denouncing “white supremacy culture” — which includes oppressive values like “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “worship of the written word.” This week’s developments would indicate the program will soon be discontinued.

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This is all tremendous news for equality believers and everyone else who’s tired of seeing politics seep into every aspect of private life. The peak of the DEI craze saw a deluge of business thinkpieces raving about the newfound benefits of diversity, but now, the sober assessments are trickling in. Executive diversity, it turns out, doesn’t improve a corporation’s financial performance. And DEI training shows that it does more harm than good: one recent Rutgers meta-analysis found that DEI training induced perceptions of racial injustice.

“This effect highlights a broader issue: DEI narratives that focus heavily on victimization and systemic oppression can foster unwarranted distrust and suspicions of institutions and alter subjective assessments of events,” cautioned the study.

Training based on high-profile DEI advocates, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, even made participants more militant: they “not only failed to positively enhance interracial attitudes, they provoked baseless suspicion and encouraged punitive attitudes.” Not exactly the makings of a productive atmosphere to work in.

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The downsides of DEI are registering more and more with workers, too: while a majority of American workers are positive on DEI, support was at a slim 52 per cent in October — that’s down from 56 per cent in February 2023. At the same time, skepticism on the rise, with 21 per cent now believing DEI training is a bad thing (that’s up from 16 per cent in 2023). They’re still more warm than cold, but they’re cooling awfully fast.

These forces have already been crushing the pillars of DEI at companies — but until now, it’s primarily affected businesses with a more conservative-coded consumer base. Bud Light’s 2023 advertising campaign and subsequent consumer boycott resulted in the company losing its number 1 spot in American beer sales the next year; fearing a similar fate, Molson Coors decided to end its own DEI training policies. Ford, Lowe’s, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply all made similar pullbacks last summer.

These companies are all big fish, but none of them are as wide-ranging as the whale that is Walmart.

Before anyone gets too excited, we should remember this isn’t a total victory. Much of the anxiety that spurred grand corporate reforms grew out of post-election progressive panic after 2016 — and its intensification following the George Floyd riots of 2020.

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Meanwhile, the changes coming to Walmart apply to several policies, and many more appear to remain unchanged. The announcement was made through a backchannel, which hints at a lack of confidence. A 2022 corporate profile of a transgender employee mentioned praise for “pronoun pins” being used in a store — none of the company’s new commitments indicate an end to that kind of in-store identity promotion. It might fade naturally, but it might not.

And a quick perusal of Walmart’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) webpage lists a number of yet-untouched programs that were trendy in the 2020-era social craze. The company has a new-ish DEI marketing board which appears to be still intact, and the same goes for the company’s racial equity “Shared Value Networks” which were introduced in 2020. Finally, the direction of the Canadian side of the company remains unknown.

But whatever happens, it’s clear that Walmart has awoken from its multi-year diversity, equity and inclusion bender — indeed, it will no longer use the term DEI — and is now groggily distancing itself from the activist nonsense it once led. Even if it hangs onto some DEI procedures here and there, it’s now clear that they aren’t unquestionably set in stone.

And if Walmart can accomplish all without being tarred and feathered by the activists who pressured it in the first place, which would have been thought impossible just a couple years ago, others will be drawn to follow. A common sense reconquista is underway in the corporate world, and this is the biggest strategic win we’ve seen yet.

National Post

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