transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] What's good, y'all? You are listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. A whole lot of people have spent the last year plus boycotting Target.

Speaker 2:
[00:14] The African-American community spends upwards of $12 million a day at Target. And so we thought that the one that was the most trafficked should be the focus of our media attention.

Speaker 3:
[00:28] The big box retailer Target is reeling. Sales have stalled, its stock price has plunged, and the company faces growing backlash months after rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI initiatives.

Speaker 1:
[00:40] And now that year long boycott is over.

Speaker 2:
[00:45] So thank you for praying with us, marching with us, and standing with us, and stay tuned for the next fight. But this fight for us has now reached its conclusion.

Speaker 1:
[00:56] But has it really all? Has it though? That voice you just heard belongs to the Reverend Jamal Bryant. He's kind of a celebrity pastor who was one of the people behind the proposed boycott of Target back in 2025. Originally, it was supposed to be a 40-day Target fast by Black consumers, and it ended up going on a lot longer and growing beyond the initial pledges. In fact, several Latino organizations called for a similar moratorium on shopping at Target. The organizers of this boycott were so activated because Target, like a lot of other big corporations, had made a bunch of pledges and commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion during the heady days of 2020, when so many people across the country were in the streets protesting the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of the police. Target specifically had pledged to increase its Black workforce by 20% across the company to spend billions of dollars with Black-owned businesses, to add hundreds of products to its shelves from Black-owned vendors, and to give $100 million to help with scholarships for students attending historically Black colleges and universities. But then, President Trump returned to the White House with a stated aim of taking a sledgehammer to all things DEI. Obviously, he's done that in a lot of ways across the federal government, but he's also threatened to use the power of the federal government to go after private corporations with diversity initiatives. Which brings us back to Target. Because Target and a lot of other companies announced at around the time that Trump was getting back in office that they were backing off their pledges for DEI. Now, Target never said explicitly that they were doing this because of Trump. The company said it was, quote, staying in step with the evolving external landscape, end quote. But come on, y'all, it wasn't hard for people to connect the dots. By the way, we hollered at Target for comment and they got back to us saying, quote, Target is more committed than ever to creating growth and opportunity for all, end quote. They listed some of the ways they say they're doing that, from investing 5% of their pre-tax dollars into local charities, to awarding $10 million to HBCU students since 2021, so that's about $2 million a year. You can find out the rest of their commitments online at their site. But to zoom out clearly, this whole situation had become much bigger than Target, because people were starting to think more deeply and more critically about corporate DEI as a concept. Corporate DEI has become another partisan battleground, and signaling that you're pro or anti-DEI has become a kind of ideological litmus test. But while I think it's safe to say we're generally familiar with the kind of arguments that conservatives have made against DEI, that it gives a leg up to minorities and de-emphasizes, air quote, merit. Last time has been given over to arguments against DEI, that come from folks who are firmly on the left. Like isn't this whole kerfuffle, this fracas, this hullabaloo about the Target boycott, just getting people to focus on what are actually pretty small, boring corporate initiatives that make for good press, but that don't actually call for having to change, say, the economic conditions for Target's hundreds of thousands of retail employees?

Speaker 4:
[04:19] So I think part of the reason why anti-racism, especially in 2020 around the George Floyd protests, became so palatable to corporations and wealthy individuals and philanthropic institutions and other institutions and individuals in these massive positions of power is because they saw that it was a way to call for change in a way that would ultimately protect their own interests.

Speaker 1:
[04:47] That's Jennifer C. Pan. Jennifer is the author of a book called Selling Social Justice, Why the Rich Love Anti-Racism. And she says that the embrace of DEI and DEI language that we saw in 2020 was not new or novel and that big business has done some version of this at other crisis points over race in America. Like to tamp down public outrage that might ultimately lead people to look more critically at the inequality that is baked in to capitalism. And so that's what we're talking about today on this episode. Hated or love it, is DEI a distraction?

Speaker 5:
[05:26] This message comes from Indeed. For small businesses, the right hire can make or break success. Relying on hope that the right candidates see a job posting isn't an effective growth strategy. Instead, match with candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results now with Indeed sponsored jobs. Receive a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job to the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Do it the right way with Indeed.

Speaker 1:
[06:03] Okay, so we are at this moment, Jennifer, where the Trump administration is fixated on getting rid of anything that has the whiff of DEI. You are a critic of DEI too, but you're coming at it from a very different place. So can you tell us what you see as the problems with DEI?

Speaker 4:
[06:21] Right, so first off the bat, I want to mention something that I think has gone a little bit under-reported in all of the back and forth on DEI. And that's simply that DEI programs don't work, or they don't work very well. And what I mean by that is when you look at the promises that DEI programs make, they say that they're going to make workplaces more diverse. They say that they're going to elevate people of color to managerial positions. They say that they're going to make things more fair in the workplace. They're going to help close pay gaps between men and women, pay gaps between black workers and white workers. And we actually have a pretty robust body of evidence on the efficacy of these programs because we've had diversity management in this country, at least since the 1960s and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, right? So, we've had a long time to figure out whether DEI works. And it turns out that the most popular DEI programs actually don't really do what they say they're going to do that well. They don't reduce bias. I think, you know, over the last year or so, we've heard a lot about anti-bias trainings and mandatory anti-racism trainings and workplaces rolling out these initiatives. Well, it turns out that these programs don't really reduce workers' biases and in many cases, they actually make them worse. And then finally, DEI programs don't really seem to be making workplaces more diverse. So I think it's important to kind of state right off that a lot of these programs fail on their own terms. And that I think is sort of the number one issue that I think has to be addressed when we're talking about DEI. And then kind of piggybacking off of that, I would say that for me, another criticism of DEI that I have is that DEI initiatives in the workplace, especially in the private sector, are often presented as things that are good for workers, right? This idea that these are programs or these are policies that we have in place to make things fair and better for everybody. Well, that sounds good in practice. But what you see in the private sector is that DEI is fundamentally a tool of management. So DEI is part of human resources, right? Which is an extension of management. So at the end of the day, although I think there are probably many, if not most, individual DEI officers who really do care about making workplaces better and do care about all of those things, the DEI office as a kind of institution within a workplace is there to protect the company.

Speaker 1:
[08:56] Right. That's the sort of the HR argument, right? It's like the HR department is not there to help you, the worker, is there to protect the company from liability, from getting into trouble. Can you imagine a context in which the DEI programs, like workplace trainings, like anti-biased trainings, where they might work?

Speaker 4:
[09:13] Well, it's interesting because, again, since we have this large body of evidence, we do have some evidence on the programs that do work. Ironically, a lot of them are programs that we wouldn't necessarily think of DEI, right? Or they're programs that sound race neutral or they're programs that don't sound like they're specifically for one group of people as opposed to another group of people. And I'm talking about things like formal mentorship opportunities or work life balance policies or thoughtful recruitment programs where companies are just being mindful about the places where they're posting jobs, right? Or the types of candidates that they are trying to reach out to. And these are things that I think we don't necessarily automatically think of as DEI, but it turns out they're really good at making workplaces better for everyone, but especially for women and people of color. And they're also really good at making workplaces more diverse. And I think that's the part that might be surprising to people, that you can have these race-neutral workplace policies that don't necessarily sound like they're intended for diversity, but end up actually increasing diversity nevertheless. And then I do have to mention that when we look at all of the things that DEI promises to do, such as close pay gaps and increase diversity and reduce workers' biases, the one thing that has a really good track record of doing that in the workplace is actually unions. And that again, I think, is something that doesn't necessarily come to mind when we think of diversity and DEI. But when you compare the record of unions and collective bargaining to the track record of corporate DEI programs, unions come out on top on all of those questions.

Speaker 1:
[10:56] Yeah, you see a lot of studies that show that just belonging to a multiracial labor union reduces racial bias among people who hold racial biases in other groups. They have to see themselves as workers, fellow workers, right? Like, you might be black, I might be white, but we're in the management as our problem.

Speaker 4:
[11:12] Exactly. And it's kind of deceptively simple. And even without the context of the union, there's other management research that shows that this happens in other contexts as well. So again, in workplaces, even if they don't have a union, if you kind of get everybody together working on a project, and the outcome of that project depends on people finding a way to bridge whatever differences may have come up before, it tends to be really effective. And as you mentioned, the union is just kind of the most surefire or the most formalized way of making that happen.

Speaker 1:
[11:45] The subculture of your book is called Why the Rich Love Anti-Racism. So, okay, in your view, why do the rich love anti-racism in the language of DEI?

Speaker 4:
[11:53] Right. So it's a pretty big question, of course. But I think what I would say is ultimately the rich love anti-racism because it does not threaten their money or their power. And I'll break that down a little bit. So we could start with the definition of anti-racism. And I think the definition that is kind of most simple is anti-racism is really just about eliminating racial disparities that exist in society at every level, right? I think that's the definition that the professor Ibram Kendi has used. And I know that's a very kind of straightforward way of thinking about the problem. Well, so I think where that gets sticky is you can technically have a society in which all of those racial disparities are eliminated, but which is still incredibly economically unequal, right? So you can have a society in which the top 1% controls 90% of the resources, 90% of the wealth and has all the power. But if that top 1% is 13% black and, you know, 20% Latino and 50% women and so on and so forth, then technically that is an equitable society. It's just not an equal one. So I think part of the reason why anti-racism, especially in 2020 around the George Floyd protests, became so palatable to corporations and, you know, wealthy individuals and philanthropic institutions and other institutions and individuals in these massive positions of power is because they saw that it was a way to call for change at a moment when things were very, very uncertain, very precarious, very kind of a mess, for lack of a better word. But at the same time, call for change in a way that would ultimately protect their own interests.

Speaker 1:
[13:44] You write in the book that during this racial reckoning of 2020, as you just mentioned, that it, quote, wasn't American working families or even most Black Americans who stood up to gain from that moment, urgent and righteous as it seemed that summer. Instead, it was the ruling class that would emerge, not only as a major sponsor of the racial reckoning, but also as its primary beneficiary. Okay, so who is the ruling class? And why did they embrace this moment of collective frustration and anger around racial injustice?

Speaker 4:
[14:14] Right, so the ruling class is the top 1%, right? The richest people in society, the top of the income distribution, but also these major institutions such as corporate America, you know, philanthropic institutions, the people who hold the levers of power and have all the money in society, basically. And I think the way in which they benefited from the racial reckoning and kind of this moment of outrage is that they were able to sign on to everything. In my book, I think I say something like, corporations donated a collective $340 billion to social justice or to racial justice initiatives as the George Floyd protests were unfolding. And I think it was just a moment that especially large employers felt they could seem like they were on the sides of basically on the side of justice, right? But at the same time, further consolidate their power, further consolidate their hold over employees and over workers, and not actually have to do much in the way of redistributing any of their wealth, or changing their practices aside from saying that they were going to do these diversity initiatives, which as we discussed earlier, are a little bit of a sham. And I think that ultimately, it sort of let them off the hook and helped sort of reaffirm the image that they have of themselves as forces for good in the world.

Speaker 1:
[15:51] How did that moment of largesse from big corporations, from rich philanthropists allow them to re-assert their power? How did they do that?

Speaker 4:
[16:00] Yeah, so if we go back to DEI, for example, I'm sure you remember in 2020, there was just a whole host of corporations. I mean, pretty much every corporation released a statement on how they were on the side of racial justice and they were committed to their black employees and their black customers and all of that. But what ended up happening is when they declared this new wave of DEI measures, that allowed them to do things like put forward this PR veneer of we're doing good already, so we don't really need any more government oversight in order to force us to treat our workers well or pay taxes or anything. And I remember back in, back during the Biden administration, Lena Kahn.

Speaker 1:
[16:47] Lena Kahn, in case y'all don't know, was the commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden.

Speaker 4:
[16:52] She had a really interesting speech where she talked about how some corporations had come to her, and they had been like, we really want you to approve our merger, and we want you to do that because we are really good. We do DEI, we have all of these ESG measures, so that is a reason why you should approve this merger, and basically give us more power and give us more leeway.

Speaker 1:
[17:15] Can you really quickly, can you define ESG just for our listeners? What is ESG?

Speaker 4:
[17:20] So ESG is basically environmental, social, and corporate governance policies, and what that is is that's basically all of the policies that corporations put forward that they say are green or that are good for workers. It's a component of what's known as stakeholder capitalism, which is this idea that corporations can do well by doing good, right? Or that corporations can be trusted to protect the environment and deliver rights to their workers and create fair and diverse workplaces without the government kind of coming down on them or without paying more taxes or without labor unions.

Speaker 1:
[18:03] You point out that in 2020, companies went so far as to embrace reparations, right? What do those calls look like? And how much traction did they get, really?

Speaker 4:
[18:13] Right. Well, I mean, it's interesting because if you think about it, the call for reparations, that's not something that corporations themselves would necessarily have to pay, right? Especially if we think about reparations as coming from the government, it's unclear whether something like reparations would really hurt their bottom line when push comes to shove, which I think is one of the things I get at in my book or one of the things that I want to try to point out that we can hear these demands for racial justice or for redistribution. But I think it's important to keep in mind, who's actually going to have to pay, right? So I think it was very easy, as you said, for corporations to embrace a lot of this very militant sounding racial justice rhetoric, because at the end of the day, it wasn't really going to hurt their bottom lines.

Speaker 1:
[19:01] You mentioned that one of the reasons that 2020 was an inflection point in why corporations felt they needed to move on this stuff was because we're at this moment in which people are so distrustful of big corporations and there's all this rising inequality. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Speaker 4:
[19:16] Yeah, yeah. I think it's not really a surprise to anybody that basically since the 70s, things in the US have been becoming incredibly unequal, right? So wages and productivity started to diverge in the 1970s. As a result, today, we have a K-shaped economy where the fortunes of the rich are just, they're just getting richer and richer, and the fortunes of everybody else are starting to decline. Wages have been stagnant over this time period. The cost of everything has gone up, especially now, I think people are really feeling it. To make matters worse, I think that we see the two political parties kind of converging on economics, right? So over the 90s, you see the Democrats famously adopting these neoliberal policies such as implementing NAFTA, welfare reform, rolling back social spending, deregulating the banks and telecommunications industries. And as a result, things now are very unequal. As I said before, the 1% is kind of capturing any new economic gains, and everybody else is sort of left to divide the crumbs. And I think in that moment, we do see a lot of rising anger and rising dissatisfaction with the status quo. You could argue that this is sort of what helped Donald Trump get elected both times. This is why Bernie Sanders kind of became an unexpected hit. So there's a lot of just rising discontent with the way things are going. And so with the kind of political status quo in question, and people sort of rumbling about, well, why is it that society is so unequal? And why is it that corporations don't pay any taxes? Whereas I'm here trying to make ends meet. I think that there was just a lot of simmering discontent sort of happening across society in very diffuse ways. In addition to that, the economy was also stagnating, right? So, you know, corporations for the last, I don't know, 30 or 40 years, basically over the same time period, have been hoarding their wealth. They, you know, they have been outsourcing jobs. They've been getting all of these tax cuts. But at the same time, they're not really investing, they're soaring profits back into the company. They're not raising workers' wages. They're really not even investing in that much new production, right? It really was an inflection point where corporations thought, well, we have a chance to do something now, and we'd rather do it ourselves. You know, we'd rather say that we're going to do these DEI programs, and we'd rather give $340 billion of our money to various racial justice efforts than have the government crack down on us and tell us what to do.

Speaker 1:
[22:03] When we come back?

Speaker 4:
[22:05] I think for a lot of American history, class and race were probably closer proxies to each other than they are now. But in this day and age, I think some of those differences get papered over when we're only talking about race.

Speaker 1:
[22:20] That's coming up. Stay with us.

Speaker 6:
[22:24] This message comes from Midi Health, a virtual care platform for women in paramenopause and menopause. Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kathleen Jordan, shares the wide range of symptoms they work to address for women in midlife.

Speaker 7:
[22:37] There's dry eyes, dry hair, dry skin, there's dry mouth, trouble sleeping, panic and anxiety attacks. When we ask patients about common symptoms, on average, they report six.

Speaker 6:
[22:48] MidiHealth, committed to helping women in midlife with paramenopause and menopause care, accessible via telehealth visits. Add join midi.com. This message comes from Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states. This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this spring? Prolon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/npr.

Speaker 1:
[23:52] Gene, just Gene this week, Code Switch. We are talking to Jennifer C. Pan, who's the author of the book Selling Social Justice, Why the Rich Love Anti-Racism. There are a lot of provocative arguments in your book, but you argue that the kind of race-first ethos of DEI stuff, or maybe race-only, depending on how you look at it, means we are ironically missing how inequality is actually shaping how people live. Can you talk about what that means in regards to how we are thinking about class or not thinking about class?

Speaker 4:
[24:25] Right, right. I'll give an example. So for example, I think everybody is very familiar with the statistic that black people are more likely to be shot by the police or more likely to be incarcerated than the white people. And I think when we're just looking at race, that of course is true. But when you start to bring class into the picture, then that complicates things a little bit. So when you look at, for example, a black college grad and a white college grad, yes, the black college grad is more likely to be shot by the police or more likely to be incarcerated than the white college graduate. However, when you start to take class into the equation, a white non-college graduate is 15 times more likely than a black college graduate to be incarcerated or to be shot by the police. So that's one way, I think, in which class matters a lot, right? And I think for a lot of American history, class and race were probably closer proxies to each other than they are now, but in this day and age, I think some of those differences get papered over when we're only talking about race.

Speaker 1:
[25:36] Right. I mean, part of the sort of, one of the critiques that you hear about DEI a lot is that, it is DEI initiatives in corporations that they necessarily affect black professionals, right? These are things that have the most consequence for black, upperly mobile or these college educated people in professional workplaces, and it has way less consequence for say, like black wage workers and people who are working class.

Speaker 4:
[25:59] Exactly. Yeah, I mean, we can look at, I know that Target has recently come under quite a lot of heat for their DEI programs, or should I say rolling back some of their DEI programs. But if you look at the policies that they rolled out during the racial reckoning, for example, one of the big policies was that they wanted to give $2 billion to black owned businesses. They wanted to find a way to fund black businesses through their various supplier programs and community initiatives and all of that. Another thing they wanted to do was they had pledged to put, I think, 500 new black owned brands on their shelves. And we can look at these things and think, well, okay, that sounds good, but does that really matter to the vast majority of black people in the US who work for a living, right? Or even the majority of black workers at Target. And I don't think that's clear.

Speaker 1:
[26:56] Yeah, that's actually, you anticipated my question, Jennifer, because I was literally about to talk about the Target boycott. Because one of the things that happened, one of the things that your book helped sort of like bring into focus for me was that the boycott of Target over the last year or plus started because the company rolled back those very DEI initiatives that you were talking about, the ones they made back in 2020.

Speaker 4:
[27:18] Right, right. Yeah, I mean, exactly. And I think, you know, it tends to take up a lot of media oxygen, I think, you know, there's constant reports on, is the DEI, is the Target DEI boycott working? Is it over yet? Some people say yes, some people say no. And I think ultimately, if you ask me, that's why Trump and his allies really like going after DEI so much, because it is kind of this like sensational media grabbing a spectacle that allows people like corporations or allows people like Trump to kind of steer away from material issues, like you said, a living wage or unions or health care.

Speaker 1:
[28:03] I mean, yes, it was like, it was such a heady time because you had people like Mitch McConnell, right? And billionaire business leaders like the head of JP Morgan Chase talking about the need to take seriously the suffering of black folks like close to home here at Code Switch. That moment put a lot of new eyeballs, a lot of new ears on the stuff we do, which we understand at the time was like plainly unsustainable. But as you argue in the book, like these moments of racial reckoning in which like political elites and businesses have to respond, like they happen fairly often in American history. It's like, can you tell us, can you give some examples of when moments like 2020 have happened before?

Speaker 4:
[28:40] Right, yeah, yeah. So one example I discuss in my book is in 1948 actually, which is maybe a little bit before some people would think of as like the high era of the civil rights movement. There, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party at the time, there was a very contentious election and they were kind of competing for black voters and basically the Democratic Party in 1948 was like, well, like we're going to become the party of racial justice now. They didn't use those terms at the time, but they said we should adopt a program of racial equality. We should convey to black voters that we're very serious about their civil rights and we're going to make it quite clear that we want black voters in our party and the reason for this is because this was on the heels of World War II and I think a lot of Americans had seen what was happening in Europe with Nazism and I think there was a moment where lots of people were thinking, well, like here in the US we have a system of racial apartheid as well. The lynchings continue to happen, there's Jim Crow in the south, and that doesn't make us feel that good when we think about this war that we just fought against the Nazis who are the ultimate evil and have this horrific system of racial categorization. So that racial reckoning in the 1940s was in a way an attempt to rehabilitate this idea of America as a multiracial democracy, right? And so that just goes to show that these moments, I think, speak to anxieties at the time, and then become ways to rehabilitate a certain part of society, whether that's this ideal of America as this shining democracy in the world, or in the case of 2020, this idea that the capitalist system is actually working fine, and what we need is to just make it more diverse.

Speaker 1:
[30:46] So, I'm curious about what you would, what if anything you would change if your book were coming out today, this year, like a year and four months into the second Trump administration. There's been this sort of wholesale assault on DEI, they've seen this sort of retrenchment and sort of retreat by corporations from the DEI. I'm wondering what you would, what observations you've made since your book dropped last year, like what has changed and how the landscape has changed in your opinion?

Speaker 4:
[31:15] Yeah. Well, you know, something I've noticed is, of course, we've been hearing a lot about certain corporations rolling back their DEI programs. And of course, the Trump administration has been, I think, especially aggressive about targeting DEI and making it clear that they're going to go after companies that they think are practicing DEI. But if you actually go and look at the numbers, the DEI isn't dead. So for every company like Target that has announced some sort of scaling back of their DEI, or for every company that seems to have capitulated to Trump on that question, there's another company that has doubled down on DEI or has said, you know, we're going to continue to do this. So, you know, Apple, Costco, I think even Goldman Sachs have all reconfirmed their commitment to DEI. On top of that, I'll add that a lot of major shareholders, other big financial institutions like Vanguard, which, you know, control these companies, they have also recommitted to DEI. And as these fights have been going on, I've been, you know, continuing to watch them and continuing to kind of keep an eye on what companies are doing in terms of DEI policies. And it sort of seems like the number one way that companies are responding to DEI is just by changing language. So a lot of them aren't really rolling back their DEI programs. What they're doing is they're calling it something new. And this really shouldn't surprise us because as I had mentioned before, DEI, or what we call diversity management, has been around basically since the 60s and has gone through a lot of rebranding and name changes throughout that period. I'll also add that in the 80s, under Ronald Reagan, or should I say Ronald Reagan was notoriously hostile to affirmative action. He didn't want companies to practice any kind of affirmative action. He hollowed out the EEOC and in fact, appointed arch conservative Clarence Thomas to preside over that agency. But during this time, you would think that corporations would throw up their hands the way some of them seem to be doing under Trump and say, OK, fine, we'll get rid of all these programs. That's not what happened at all. I think there's some statistic like 9 out of 10 companies during the Reagan era, not only kept their diversity programs, but also increased them. So that's all to say that, you know, once again, the corporate sector isn't always in lockstep with what the administration is doing. And I think that DEI is just going through another evolution.

Speaker 1:
[33:54] There's this very sort of fascinating thing you'll point out, which is like that people have been trying to kill whatever the sort of contemporary version of DEI has been for like for decades now, right? Like whenever there's been certain hostile administrations towards racial justice and civil rights, and corporations have managed to sort of rebrand their departments or the people in the companies who focus on those things. At the same time, you're saying that like that sort of persistence of these programs belies the fact that they do not work, right? Like, right?

Speaker 4:
[34:26] Which is so fascinating. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I want to underscore that because why, you know, if companies just basically have an excuse now to get rid of all of their DEI programs, as they did under Reagan, as they did as it now seems like they do under Trump, why are so many of them still holding on to them, right? And I think that, yeah, like you said, that raises the question like it must benefit them in some way.

Speaker 1:
[34:50] And the benefit, you said, is mostly sort of reputational. And obviously, like a lot of people who work at these companies believe in that, like believe in the mission of DEI, believe in the sort of, you know, that there's like social responsibility that companies have to, you know, whoever their consumers are, whoever their employees are, right? And so it's not like, it's not just cynicism, right?

Speaker 4:
[35:11] I, you know, I don't think it's just cynicism, for sure. Like I said before, I think especially with individual DEI officers or people who work in these fields, I think there are a lot of good intentions there. I think individual, you know, employees and individual actors and even, even CEOs and, you know, managers probably do want to make things better for their workers. But at the end of the day, I think the fundamental problem with sort of leaving social justice to the corporations is that they are beholden to their bottom line, right? So when the rubber beats the road, you know, I don't think they can be counted on necessarily to do the right thing. And I think, you know, with DEI, with ESG, with any of these other programs that we've been talking about, it behooves them to make an effort to do these things rather than forced to, like I said before, you know, raise their wages or pay taxes or, you know, give up their power or money in some substantive way.

Speaker 1:
[36:18] And that is our show. But just to remind y'all that signing up for Code Switch Plus is a great way to support our show and to support public media you might have heard. We could really, really use it right now. And you get to listen to episodes of our show and a bunch of other NPR faves, sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch. This episode you're listening to is produced by Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Lea Dannella and our engineer was Jimmy Keely. And I will be remiss if I did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch massive, who are of course Christina Kala, Jess Kung, Daya Mortada, BA. Parker and Yolanda Sanguene. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, yo.

Speaker 6:
[37:02] This message comes from Green Chef. Green Chef is certified clean with organic produce, responsibly sourced proteins and real whole food ingredients backed by nutritionists. Choose from 40 plus customizable recipes each week tailored to your needs, delivered straight to your door. Enjoy Mediterranean, plant-based, verified gluten-free and more. Get 50% off your first box, then 20% off for two months at greenchef.com/50npr with code 50NPR. This message comes from Easy Cater, the workplace food platform. Easy Cater helps organizations order food from favorite restaurants, meet dietary needs, and stay on budget. With employee meal programs, flexible payment options, and 24-7 customer support, all on one platform. Learn more at easycater.com. Support for NPR and the following message come from Spectrum Business, providing connectivity solutions to help your business stay online and on track, delivering fast, reliable internet, phone, TV, and mobile solutions, all backed by 100% U.S.-based support. They offer scalable plans and straightforward pricing. Spectrum Business, reliable connections, responsive support, and tailored solutions that power your success. Learn more at spectrum.com/business. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas.