Over the past few days and months, a slew of US companies, including Amazon, McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, John Deere, and Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), have… Announce End of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. They will scale back initiatives aimed at promoting fair treatment and “full” participation of their employees, especially those from minority groups (i.e. gender, racial, LGBT, indigenous, and disability groups).

Adopted over the past decade and a half, and escalating in the wake of protests across the United States in the wake of police brutality and the killing of George Floyd in 2020, these corporate initiatives have included incorporating DEI into hiring practices and supplier selection, most often through “Unconscious bias” training for employees.

The ostensible reason for this business change in DEI is that, as Amazon said, it is now “outdated”. But we should not be deceived; There is a remarkable business logic behind this.

The timing of a series of major companies revealing their calculations that DEI is no longer beneficial to their brands. In the face of a growing backlash from US conservatives against corporate efforts to attract minorities, the likes of Meta and Amazon are well aware that the coming Trump regime heralds the end of the era of social “progressivism.”

So repealing DEI is not just a way to mend relations with Trump, who has been a fierce critic of equality, but rather it is to adjust companies’ marketing strategies to align with right-wing conservatism in the United States. “Wokeism” is definitely over.

Removing DEI would be a business cost-cutting measure as well: it is estimated that US companies spend about US$1.5 billion 8 billion dollars Annually on equity initiatives.

But the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this institutional fluctuation is that there was never any principled commitment to equality in the first place. DEI is adopted by companies not to address social inequality but to build a brand, i.e. build a company image in order to sell more products. That time has passed now.

However, the short lifespan of DEI should not surprise us. Let us not forget that corporate capitalism is based on social and economic inequality – a hierarchy between small shareholder elites who own and control productive assets, and a huge wage labor force, which today includes armies of sweatshop workers in the Global South on whom branded companies depend. Decisively strong business on.

Therefore, DEI is a way to put a human face on corporate inequality. The often token inclusion of minorities under the guise of “fairness” provides the illusion of creating greater equality. But she didn’t and didn’t do that.

Many analysts have condemned corporate DEI for spawning a billion-dollar “diversity industry” of studies, trainers and “diversity czars” while doing nothing to address inequality. Thus the corporate equity agenda has been accused of being merely cosmetic – an ideological cloak – that may make us feel better, but simply deceives us by including a small number of minorities in the workforce and management (mostly in the Global North). ), we work to reduce inequality.

In fact, the opposite is true: wealth and income inequality around the world has increased sharply overall over the past two decades, especially in the United States.

So, if stocks are little more than a brand name or a corporate cover for inequality, what can we expect now that digital investing has been abandoned? We got glimpses of the answer in the recent Meta announcement, which is that in addition to eliminating DEI, it also… Cancel fact checking On all its platforms.

Instead, a “community feedback” system similar to that used by S, where community members identify misleading claims, will replace fact-checking, which, we remember, was specifically intended to ensure against misinformation, and extreme bias against Minorities.

The idea, according to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is to return to “freedom of expression,” despite the fact that since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Company The phenomenon of Islamophobia has escalated on the platform.

29Thus, ending DEI, just like eliminating fact-checking, will further mitigate the inequalities (and inequality) that underpin corporate capitalism. If DEI puts a human face on this inequality, abandoning it would make the inequality more apparent: companies would now be less reluctant to continue to engage in hiring and procurement practices that privilege the already wealthy.

Wikism is out. Intolerance exists. Meanwhile, inequality continues unabated.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.