Walmart rolling back DEI commitments amid conservative backlash

Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, is rolling back its diversity initiatives amid an increasingly challenging legal landscape for such programs—and as conservative activists threaten boycotts on social media.

The retailer announced this week that it has stopped using the term DEI—which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion—and has replaced it with “belonging.” And it will no longer consider race and gender when choosing suppliers, a practice it leaned into after the 2020 murder of George Floyd ushered in a national reckoning on race.

Walmart also will discontinue DEI training offered by the Racial Equity Institute, a corporate consultancy; stop participating in the equality ratings by the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent LGBTQ+ advocacy group; and put guardrails on which community events, such as drag shows and Pride events, it supports through grants.

“We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect, but every decision comes from a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers and to be a Walmart for everyone,” the company said in a statement Monday.

Walmart’s shift marks the latest win for the anti-DEI movement, which has been gaining traction since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in university admissions in June 2023. A succession of businesses and government agencies have dismantled or retooled programs meant to diversify their ranks, in the face of legal scrutiny.

It is also an about-face for the retailer, which committed $100 million toward racial equity initiatives in 2020. The pledge was part of a broader effort undertaken by dozens of America’s largest public companies and their foundations. Walmart’s initiative will close in 2025, the company said.

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who regularly takes to social media and threatens to expose companies’ overtly liberal policies, claimed victory Monday, telling his more than 700,000 followers on X that his pressure campaign was successful.

“Last week I told execs at @Walmart that I was doing a story on wokeness there. Instead we had productive conversations to find solutions,” he wrote.

Starbuck has taken similar victory laps following DEI retreats by Boeing, Caterpillar, Toyota, Brown-Forman, Molson Coors, Deere & Company and Ford Motor Company. But Walmart might be his largest trophy yet—even as the company downplays his influence.

The retailer said some of the changes, such as dropping the use of racial criteria in awarding contracts, had been under review before Starbuck’s online campaign. It replaced “DEI” with “belonging” roughly a year ago, it said. Other U.S. businesses and groups have made similar name changes amid growing legal, social and political backlash.

But the company’s decision to not participate in the HRC equality ratings was in response to Starbuck’s campaign, according to Walmart, which only a year ago touted its high marks from the advocacy group.

DEI refers to a wide range of practices that seek to increase employment and educational opportunities for historically marginalized groups. But critics contend the programs end up discriminating against nonminorities, and that policies should focus on race neutrality.

The 2020 murder of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, at the hands of a White police officer in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests and calls for racial justice, and wide-ranging social and economic reforms. Dozens of major corporations committed billions to such initiatives.

“We must continue to address systemic racism and the structural inequities that are rooted in this nation’s history of slavery and that persist today,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon wrote in a 2021 update on the company’s equity initiatives.

But over the past year, race-targeted grant-making and diversity initiatives have come under intense legal scrutiny, with dozens of companies fighting off lawsuits filed by conservative public interest groups.

Meanwhile, private companies are acting preemptively, seeking to avoid litigation by terminating fellowships and executive bonus programs aimed at employing minorities. Some have responded by changing their language—from fewer references to the word “diversity” in public communications to reviewing how race is discussed during trainings.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who has been tapped as the next ambassador to Israel, said on X that Starbuck deserved a standing ovation for his activism and that Walmart, which is based in Arkansas, should receive praise for “focusing on the core business of retail.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s victory this month has increased expectations that the political momentum against such policies will grow. DEI advocates have expressed concern that the Trump administration could file additional lawsuits against such programs in public schools, saying that diversity and equity programs amount to racial discrimination.

The conservative backlash grows despite 6 in 10 Americans having said that DEI initiatives are “a good thing,” according to a poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos. Support was higher for specific programs such as internships for underrepresented groups and anti-bias training.