Walmart becomes latest business to pull back from DEI policies after conservative pressure campaign

Walmart is cutting back its diversity programs after a conservative activist threatened to call a boycott days before Black Friday.

Robby Starbuck, a former music video director who campaigns against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, said on Monday that he had persuaded the US retail giant to end a raft of "woke policies" such as providing racial equity training to its workers and funding anti-racist non-profits.

The company will review all funding for LGBT+ Pride events, remove all "transgender products" marketed to children from its stores, and stop participating in the Human Rights Council's LGBT+ equality index.

It will also stop using the terms "DEI" and "LatinX" in official communications and stop requiring its suppliers to provide "certain demographic data" as part of its supplier diversity program.

The Arkansas-based retailer will review grants to Pride events to make sure it is not financially supporting sexualized content targeting kids. For example, the company wants to makes sure a family pavilion is not next to a drag show at a Pride event, the company told the Associated Press. The company said it will no longer consider race and gender as a way to increase diversity when it offers supplier contracts.

It is only the latest big company to bow to similar pressure from Starbuck and other conservative activists, following Boeing, Harley Davidson, and tractor maker John Deere.

A spokesperson for Walmart confirmed that it had made changes in a statement to The Independent, saying it was committed to being "a Walmart for everyone.”

"This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America," said Starbuck in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

"Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.

"We are winning, and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America."

Like many US corporations, Walmart – which is the country's biggest single employer with a workforce of around 2.1m – launched many new diversity programs in the wake of the George Floyd protests in May and June 2020.

But since then, Donald Trump and his supporters have made DEI initiatives a primary target, hoping to roll back corporate America's support for progressive causes.

"Shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies," said Starbuck.

"Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit."

A Walmart spokesperson told Bloomberg News that it was already reviewing some of the programs named by Starbuck, including the supplier diversity program.

"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," a spokesperson told The Independent.