They Replaced "Diversity" with "Belonging"—And Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

Corporate America is scrubbing the word "DEI" from existence. The violence hasn't stopped. They've just changed what they call it.

Walmart no longer has a Chief Diversity Officer. They have a "Chief Belonging Officer." McDonald's no longer has a diversity team. They have a "Global Inclusion Team." Target no longer has a Supplier Diversity program. They have "Supplier Engagement."

If you think this is just corporate rebranding, you have not been paying attention.

Language is how power operates. What we are witnessing is the most coordinated linguistic assault on Black economic advancement since "states' rights" replaced "slavery" in the American vocabulary.

The Playbook Is 200 Years Old

In 1828, Senator John C. Calhoun defended "the peculiar domestick institution" on the floor of the United States Senate. Not slavery. The peculiar institution. The term spread because it served a function: it allowed white Southerners to discuss the systematic torture, rape, and economic exploitation of Black people without ever naming what they were doing.

After the Civil War, the language shifted again. It was no longer about slavery—it was about "states' rights." The Confederacy hadn't fought to own human beings. They had fought for "heritage."

The violence never stopped. The words just got cleaner.

This is the through-line of American white supremacy: the constant, deliberate refinement of language to conceal what is actually happening. And now we are watching it happen again.

What They Actually Eliminated

Let me be precise.

Walmart, in November 2024, stopped sharing data with the Human Rights Campaign, ended its commitment to supplier diversity, and shut down its $100 million Center for Racial Equity—a fund created in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered eight miles from Walmart's regional headquarters.

McDonald's, in January 2025, eliminated representation goals for leadership, ended its requirement that suppliers commit to DEI practices, and replaced it with "a more integrated discussion with suppliers about inclusion as it relates to business performance."

Target, five days after Trump's inauguration, announced it was ending its three-year DEI goals, shutting down its Racial Equity Action and Change (REACH) program—which had committed $100 million to Black communities—and rebranding its "Supplier Diversity" team as "Supplier Engagement."

Read that McDonald's phrase again: "inclusion as it relates to business performance."

Inclusion is no longer a moral imperative. It is a business consideration—which means it can be discarded whenever it becomes inconvenient.

Why "Belonging" Is Not Neutral

"Belonging" centers the institution, not the people the institution has historically excluded.

When Walmart says it wants employees to feel like they "belong," the embedded question is: belong to what? The answer is: belong to the existing structure. Belong to the culture as it already exists—a culture built without Black people in decision-making positions, without Black suppliers, without any acknowledgment that the playing field was never level.

"Diversity" names a demographic reality and requires institutions to actively work to include people they have historically excluded.

"Belonging" erases that work. It suggests you just need to fit in. Assimilate. If you don't feel like you belong, the problem is you—not the structure that was never built to include you.

This is not semantics. This is a psychological framework designed to shift responsibility from the institution to the individual.

The Workers Being Erased

The corporate retreat from DEI is happening at the exact moment that Black women are facing a compounded economic crisis.

As of November 2025, the unemployment rate for Black women stood at 7.1%—more than double the 3.4% rate for white women. Between February and August 2025 alone, an estimated 300,000 Black women exited or were displaced from the labor force.

The roles being automated and eliminated are not random. Customer service, administrative support, HR screening—these are positions where Black women have historically found footing in corporate America. And these are the positions being cut first.

Meanwhile, the programs designed to move Black women into leadership—the representation goals, the supplier diversity commitments, the C-suite pipelines—are being dismantled under the convenient language of "belonging" and "evolving our approach."

Black women already earn only 64 cents for every dollar white men earn. Over a 40-year career, that gap compounds to over $1 million in lost income. And now the entry points are closing.

Who belongs when the jobs are gone? Who belongs when the pathways to leadership have been renamed into nonexistence?

The answer is the same as it has always been: those who were already there.

The Permission Structure

Every company that rolled back DEI cited the same justification: the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down race-conscious college admissions.

That decision applied to universities. It said nothing about corporate hiring practices, supplier diversity programs, or internal representation goals.

But it didn't need to. The decision provided what these companies were waiting for: a permission structure.

Corporate America did not roll back DEI because the law required it. They rolled it back because they wanted to, and the legal and political climate gave them cover.

What This Reveals

In 2020, after George Floyd was murdered on camera, corporations committed billions of dollars to racial equity. They hired Chief Diversity Officers. They announced representation goals.

Five years later, when the political winds shifted, they eliminated those programs with the same speed they created them.

The lesson is not that these companies are uniquely bad. The lesson is that institutions will always do what power permits them to do—and language will always be deployed to make that permission seem reasonable.

Do not believe the rebranding.

When slavery became the "peculiar institution," the torture continued. When segregation became "separate but equal," the exclusion continued. When mass incarceration became "law and order," the targeting continued.

And when DEI becomes "belonging," the structural barriers will remain exactly where they have always been—invisible to those who benefit from them, devastating to those who do not.

Believe what they do, not what they call it.

Dante King is a Human Resources Management Consultant, legal expert witness, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medical Education at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. He has spent over 15 years advising major institutions—including Mayo Clinic, Stanford Medicine, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, the San Francisco Police Department, and Fortune 500 companies—on workforce strategy, antiracism policy development, and institutional transformation. He is the author of the award-winning Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness and The 400-Year Holocaust.

→ Read & Watch: The patterns described in this essay—the sanitization of language, the erasure of accountability—are documented across 400 years of American law in Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness and the accompanying 10-part docuseries.

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