Five years after George Floyd’s murder, many companies have backed away from DEI commitments

In the spring of 2020, just days after police murdered George Floyd on a Minneapolis street, Blackrock Inc. CEO Laurence Fink said, “No organization is immune from the challenges posed by racial bias. As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organizations and not tolerate our shortcomings.”

While Fink was just one of the countless business leaders that spoke in support of racial justice that summer and committed to change, that echo now seems faint. Just five years later, BlackRock, and at least 50 other companies have walked back or abandoned their commitments to racial equality and DEI. The future of corporate DEI initiatives is uncertain as the federal government has threatened private businesses over anything that could be viewed as “DEI,” although the administration hasn’t clarified which activities that term includes.

A look back. While many companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon had DEI programming long before 2020, the racial awakening in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder caused corporate America to take a hard look in the mirror.

Companies not only said “Black lives matter,” they took the position that commenting on social justice issues was important. Indeed, most Americans wanted companies to take a stance on social issues, according to Pew Research and Gartner.

It wasn’t just cookie-cutter statements coming from corporate America either. Companies pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to advancing racial equity. In 2020, Walmart, the largest US employer, announced $100 million for its new non-profit, Center for Racial Equity, which it retired in late 2024. Target promised $10 million to organizations, including the National Urban League and the African American Leadership Forum, and established a racial equity action committee.

Companies also invested heavily in building dedicated DEI teams, tripled the hiring of chief diversity officers, and poured money into implicit bias training shortly after the May killing, PBS reported. DEI roles also increased by 55% in 2020, according to SHRM.

The investments appeared to have some initial success, although DEI metrics are notoriously hard to quantify. Black representation in the S&P 100, for instance, hit a high of 17% in 2021, according to Bloomberg.

Falling back. Despite the commitments made in 2020, companies were already beginning to cut the size of their DEI teams by the time the Great Resignation subsided in 2022.

By December 2024, after the job market had slowed considerably from the peaks of 2021, companies had largely lost any gains for Black workers they had seen since 2020. Bloomberg noted that the workforce especially lost traction of Black workers amid cuts in 2023, and accounted for 26% of overall S&P 100 losses.

Anti-DEI sentiment was becoming a factor, too. Since 2022, organizations, activists, and politicians, including America First Legal, Elon Musk, Robby Starbuck, and President Trump have protested DEI initiatives. Much of the current drive away from DEI appears to be driven by President Trump’s reelection and stance on DEI. President Trump has signed multiple anti-DEI executive orders, and has threatened to end cut federal contracts with companies with DEI programs.

More than three quarters of the companies that have made changes to their DEI initiatives have done so since the 2024 election. In fact, more than 50 large employers have changed their DEI policies, including Verizon, Deloitte, and Meta which all dissolved their DEI teams.

Consumer sentiment has changed since 2020 as well. A majority of Americans now want companies to remain neutral on social and political issues, according to a Jan. 2025 Ipsos report. Voters are also divided on workplace DEI programs, NBC News found, with a near even split between those who support and oppose the initiatives.

However, there are still many employers unwilling to back down. Microsoft, JPMorgan, Apple, and Amazon have all doubled down on diversity and inclusion, although some have rebranded DEI.

What happens next? Roughly four in 10 employers said they’re planning “substantive” changes to DEI this year, HR Brew previously reported. Jarvis Sam, founder of the Rainbow Disruption and professor at Brown University, told HR Brew that companies face a potentially difficult road. Some of them did not build their DEI programs in good faith, Sam noted, and their commitments in 2020 were “performative.”

“They never actually desired to hold leaders within the organization or executive teams accountable to the performance of DEI goals,” Sam said.

Moving forward, companies may examine which DEI strategies worked in the past and weigh how to move forward. Companies that appear to waffle in their ongoing commitments to DEI or have inconsistent messaging may open themselves up to risk, according to Sam. Target, for example, has largely eliminated DEI, but is also profiting off DEI-related practices, like selling Pride-related merchandise.

“Inconsistency breeds risk,” Sam said. “The more that they’re inconsistent in how they build policy around this [DEI] work breeds opportunities for risk to arrive, either at the shareholder level, the employee level, or the policy and approach that the organization built.”