News has swept across the business media today that Walmart is the latest major corporation to abandon its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in areas like hiring, vendors, contracting, and charity.
Call us skeptical. Distrust and verify.
The changes were credited to the pressure applied by effective social media activist Robby Starbuck. Fox Business reports:
Starbuck outlined the changes Walmart agreed to make, including working to remove sexual and transgender products inappropriately marketed toward children and reviewing grants to Pride events to avoid funding sexualized content targeting kids.
Walmart clarified that these changes have been in the works for a few years and were not a result of the conversation with Starbuck.
Walmart confirmed to FOX Business that it plans to change how it monitors products within its marketplace and reviews the funding of grants.
The company said some products that violated its policies have been removed, such as chest binders – products designed to flatten the chest – when marketed to children.
The company also confirmed it will review all grants, especially for community events, to ensure they promote an appropriate environment for children. However, Walmart will continue to support Pride celebrations.
The company has also decided not to extend the Racial Equity Center it launched in 2020 as a five-year initiative and will ditch the terms “LatinX” and even “DEI” altogether in official communications. It will instead focus on the term “belonging” for all associates and customers.
Walmart also joined an array of companies in recent months – including Ford and John Deere – to end participation in the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, which is an annual survey and report used to gauge “policies, practices and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) employees.”
As a shareholder, NLPC has a history with Walmart, in which we have sought to hold the company accountable with regard to DEI, imposing critical race theory on its employees, LGBTQ indoctrination of children, and other leftist agenda items.
At the company’s annual meeting in 2022, we sponsored a shareholder proposal that sought greater transparency about its charitable contributions and the groups and causes it supports. Walmart’s board fought the proposal, opposing it in the proxy statement. Based on whistleblower information obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo, we said at the meeting:
In October it was revealed that Walmart had implemented mandatory Critical Race Theory training for its executives.
And the program is “recommended” for hourly employees.
The company has admitted that it has run this program since 2018.
In the program, employees are told that the United States is a “white supremacy system,” designed by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege.”
It also states that white Americans have been subjected to “racist conditioning” that indoctrinates them into “white supremacy.”
We also noted at the meeting that Walmart had co-sponsored the 60th birthday party of race hustler Al Sharpton.
Last year at Walmart’s annual meeting we sponsored another shareholder proposal, seeking transparency about the extreme risks posed by the company’s extensive business ties to China. The board of directors again fought us. We called attention to Walmart’s virtue-signaling on “woke,” which it prefers rather than truly reveal the nature of their human rights risks that come with being in business with communists:
Walmart…notes concerns it has about migrant labor in Malaysia, and its supply chains in Central America and India.
But when it comes to human rights, there is pretty much no mention of China.
Why is that, at a company like Walmart whose reputation is in many ways known for the label, “Made in China?”
Oh, there are a few mentions of China on Walmart’s website with regard to other issues.
Those ESG issues would be climate change, biodiversity, protecting forests, and foodborne illness.
So, communist China has been credibly accused by the U.S. State Department of censorship, political imprisonment, forced labor, torture, organ harvesting, genocide, threatening its neighbors, and many other atrocities.
None of these are worth a mention on any of Walmart’s disclosures, while other lesser-offending countries are mentioned.
And this year Walmart resisted our shareholder proposal so aggressively, that it asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to let them keep it out of its annual meeting. Our proposal requested that the board of directors examine its relationships and associations with politically controversial outside groups, but unfortunately the SEC allowed Walmart to exclude it.
Nonetheless, the proposal for this year called attention to several of the issues that Walmart now says it is going to reverse policy on — for example, its association with Human Rights Campaign, its marketing of LGBTQ-themed merchandise to children, and its “longtime association” and significant financial support for PFLAG, which advocates for the placement of sexually explicit books in schools and libraries and for body-altering procedures on children who think they are “transgender” without their parents’ knowledge.
So considering how aggressively and how recently Walmart has opposed challenges to its pro-DEI and -LGBTQ activism, we are suspicious about this current alleged about-face. To revisit the claims the company is now making about its plans, which are also featured in reports by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, we ask specifically:
- “…working to remove sexual and transgender products inappropriately marketed toward children…” — Walmart runs an Amazon-like third-party vendor platform which appears in many cases like a poorly-controlled, Wild-West marketplace. Just how does the company plan to police this?
- “reviewing grants to Pride events to avoid funding sexualized content targeting kids,” and “the company also confirmed it will review all grants, especially for community events, to ensure they promote an appropriate environment for children. However, Walmart will continue to support Pride celebrations.” — Just how is Walmart going to monitor Pride parades and festivals to assure it is not funding events where children are not sexualized?
- “The company has also decided not to extend the Racial Equity Center it launched in 2020 as a five-year initiative and will ditch the terms “LatinX” and even “DEI” altogether in official communications. It will instead focus on the term “belonging” for all associates and customers.” — Deciding “not to extend” something it wasn’t committing to do in the first place isn’t necessarily “ending DEI,” especially if you are only replacing the now-toxic acronym with “belonging.” And only elites used the term “LatinX” while the majority of Hispanics hated the term.
- “Walmart also joined an array of companies in recent months…to end participation in the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, which is an annual survey and report used to gauge “policies, practices and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) employees.” — This is hardly bold, as HRC is now toxic also in Corporate America. It doesn’t mean that Sam Walton’s heirs, who control the voting majority of the company’s stock, won’t continue to promote their agenda through other, non-transparent means. It’s an issue that several key family members are passionate about.
The bottom line is that, in reality, Walmart appears to be taking a number of half-measures to give the appearance that it is abandoning DEI — just enough to silence its critics. Whether the company actually does so meaningfully remains to be seen.
And if Walmart indeed has been considering these changes long before Starbuck engaged on it, NLPC had raised our objections over them long ago, both with our proposals, and in direct conversations with company officials.
