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Walmart is sorry.
It said so last week in a statement. Said it “wasn’t perfect” in its efforts to be more inclusive, more diverse, more equitable. It admitted to falling short, but noted that its efforts came from “a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging.”
It was apologizing to white people.
You know that because the statement accompanied the admission by Walmart that it was rolling back its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, no longer pursuing a goal of maintaining a certain percentage of minority vendors and no longer participating in a national survey monitoring the employment figures for LGBTQ+ people. Those efforts were, apparently, a mistake in this new Trump-got-elected-again world.
And so, Walmart is sorry, white people, for not discriminating more for us.
To be fair to Walmart (although I’m not sure Walmart would recognize fairness), the company wasn’t alone in scaling back or eliminating DEI programs and race-focused initiatives, many of which began in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. National corporations from coast to coast, facing outrage from small pockets of serially victimized white people who view equality as discrimination against them, have also eliminated programs and positions, done away with gender equality efforts and specifically scrapped race-based hiring and vendor efforts.
Because, dammit, that’s just reverse discrimination! Elon Musk said so!
I have to tell you, it is endlessly depressing how easily manipulated and how remarkably forgetful much of this country has become. How do y’all not remember three years ago? You literally have super-computers in your pockets, giving you the ability to search out and find pretty much any information you’d like, and y’all can’t remember 2021?
You can’t remember why these programs were put in place? Why pretty much everyone viewed DEI and similar efforts as not only necessary, but long, long overdue?
Allow me to remind you of a few things.
Numerous studies from the faraway days of 2021 found that race-based hiring discrimination existed at pretty much every level of employment in corporate America, but was particularly prevalent among executives and vendors. Additionally, studies found that the addition of diversity in hiring efforts by companies, while righting a historic wrong, would increase company market reach and increase profits.
A study put together in 2021 by researchers from Northwestern, Harvard and an institute in Norway found that race-based hiring discrimination against Black Americans was unchanged since 1989. In that study, researchers reviewed more 54,000 job applications for more than 25,000 jobs, finding that white applicants received 36 percent more call backs than equally qualified Black applicants. White applicants received 24 percent more call backs than equally qualified Latino applicants.
A study by Citigroup in 2021 found that the gap in Black pay, housing and investing had cost the American economy more than $16 trillion over the previous 20 years, with the pay gap accounting for more than $2.7 trillion.
Companies also were forced to face up to the fact that minority employees were almost nonexistent among executive-level positions. A USA Today study in 2021 found that of the 279 executives listed on the websites of the top 50 largest companies on the S&P 100, only FIVE were Black. Five.
I know y’all have forgotten the long-ago memories from 2021, but a simple Google search would show you that such data on racism and systemic discrimination – and news stories using that data – dominated the American conscience for months. The interwebs were a steady stream of news reports highlighting more evidence of longterm discrimination and companies voluntarily owning up to their roles in that discrimination and then making promises to “be better.”
Name a national company – Nike, Amazon, Walmart, L’Oreal, Ford, Pepsi, Coke, the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL – and that company slapped a black-out photo on their social media page and issued a press release vowing that the historic wrongs would be addressed and a new day had broken.
Three years.
That’s how long the new day lasted. That’s how long it took for you goobers to realize that leveling the playing field meant you didn’t receive the same advantages, that your unqualified kids might not get into college by virtue of their last names, that your idiot brother-in-law’s company might not get the contract just ‘cause.
Three years.
That’s how long it took before corporate America was apologizing to white people for daring to subject them to equality.
