In the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, corporate America faced a racial reckoning. Companies across industries reacted by publicly pledging to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, launching new task forces, creating new roles, and promising to build workplaces that better reflected the countries they served.
But in recent months, as political pressure against DEI has intensified, many organizations have quietly scaled back or abandoned those commitments.
That retreat, according to Dr. Bernice A. King, CEO of The King Center and daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., reveals something fundamental: many companies were never truly committed to DEI.
“If you retreat that quick, it suggests to me that reveals who you really are,” she said Tuesday at Fortune’s 2026 Workplace Innovation Summit in Atlanta during a panel moderated by Fortune senior writer Phil Wahba.
“When you know who you are, when you know those values, when you live by those values, when you infuse those values in the culture, when the pressure shows up, you don’t retreat.”
