One year after President Donald Trump signed an executive order dismantling federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the scale of damage is no longer abstract. Nearly 300,000 Black women exited the labor force in the first half of 2025 alone, pushing Black unemployment to 8 percent—roughly double the white rate of 3.9 percent. More than 69,000 federal positions were cut by mid-2025, many tied to equity work or held by Black women. Meta terminated its DEI programs entirely. Verizon eliminated all DEI-focused HR roles. Goldman Sachs removed diversity considerations for board membership—not through independent judgment, but as the result of a deal struck with the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-wing anti-labor group that has spent years dismantling corporate equity programs.
Social justice strategist Rashad Robinson argues these outcomes are not isolated retreats but coordinated infrastructure at work. Writing for NewsOne on the anniversary of Trump’s January 20, 2025 inauguration, and in his March 2026 newsletter, Robinson outlined a framework for movements confronting this rollback: make discrimination expensive, unpopular, and unsustainable.
Rashad Robinson and the Cost of Rolling Back Equity
Robinson’s analysis starts from a clear premise: discrimination advances not because it is popular, but because it is often cheap. Research he cites shows that 57 percent of companies that cut DEI initiatives reported hiring declines for historically excluded groups—a 37 percent drop in hiring women of color and a 33 percent drop in hiring men of color. The EEOC eliminated its use of disparate impact investigations, one of the most effective legal tools communities of color had to challenge policies operating behind neutral language.
The Paycheck Protection Program offers a clarifying precedent. When COVID-19 relief funds moved without equity guardrails, banks overwhelmingly directed money to white-owned businesses. “When there is nothing in place to ensure fairness, the default is discrimination,” Robinson wrote. The downstream effects—businesses that never launched, employees never trained, generational wealth never built—are what DEI policies were designed to prevent.
Consumer Power That Forces Corporate Consequences
Robinson’s framework begins with consumer pressure, targeting corporations that “ask us to buy their products by day, then attack our rights by night.” The Feb. 28, 2025 Economic Blackout called on Americans to withhold spending from major retailers that had abandoned DEI commitments, while the NAACP simultaneously released a Black Consumer Advisory urging communities to treat their estimated $1.7 trillion in buying power as a direct accountability tool. Costco, which held firm on DEI after its board rejected a right-wing shareholder proposal demanding they report the “risks” of diversity policies, drew consumers practicing a “buy-cott”—rewarding companies that did not retreat. Shareholders backed Costco’s position with 98 percent of votes.
Robinson’s own work demonstrates what makes that pressure stick. Rather than leading with public confrontation, Rashad and his team have built campaigns by cultivating executive relationships and making inaction the more costly choice. Corporations respond when the financial calculus shifts—not simply when the moral argument becomes more persuasive. “Making change inside of big institutions is hard,” Robinson told Fast Company. The difference is whether movements give corporations a structural reason to move.
Rashad Robinson on Making Finance Accountable
The second tier of Robinson’s strategy moves to the financial institutions that underwrite corporate behavior. He points to billionaire investor Bill Ackman as a visible example: Ackman campaigned publicly against DEI at elite institutions while maintaining investments in companies claiming neutrality. Following Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation, Ackman described DEI as “inherently racist and illegal”—rhetoric that helped legitimize broader corporate retreats. “There is nothing neutral about financing a backlash,” Robinson wrote.
Goldman’s capitulation to the National Legal and Policy Center illustrates how anti-equity infrastructure operates. The decision reflected coordinated leveraged pressure from the right—not market logic or shareholder consensus. Robinson argues the same mechanisms can work in the other direction. “Corporate behavior is not inevitable—it’s responsive,” he wrote. “And right now, it is responding to the wrong people.”
Why Local Pressure Moves Faster Than National Outrage
Robinson’s third tier targets local organizing, where accountability is harder to deflect and the actors are visible. When corporations and local officials have names and addresses, pressure becomes concrete.
After ICE operations in January 2026 generated community outrage, residents did not stop at national appeals—they confronted local businesses and officials with specific demands. That kind of place-based pressure is harder to deflect precisely because the actors are visible and the consequences are immediate.
“When communities organize where they live, where they shop, and where they work, we can move faster and win more,” Robinson wrote. Local fights become national signals when they are coordinated and amplified.
From Program Cuts to Normalized Discrimination
Robinson draws a hard line between 2025 and what he sees coming next. “Last year was the year of rollbacks,” he wrote in his March 2026 newsletter. “This year is shaping up to be the year of advancing discrimination.”
Public statements from senior officials about “male standards” or appearance requirements lay groundwork for proactive exclusion—not just the quiet abandonment of programs, but policies that actively target Black people, women, and other marginalized groups. “If year one was about canceling programs and intimidating institutions,” Robinson wrote, “year two will be about making discrimination look normal and permanent.”
Robinson recently hosted a Freedom Table conversation on NewsOne with NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director-Counsel Janai Nelson, author Michael Harriot, and Global Black Economic Forum CEO Alphonso David to examine these dynamics: how DEI attacks have moved across institutions, how they reshape corporate incentives, and what organized resistance requires. “Too many people still think of DEI as a fluff issue—something symbolic, something that can wait,” Robinson wrote. “That is a dangerous miscalculation.”
Building Leverage That Makes Discrimination Unsustainable
Robinson is clear about what will not work. “The answer is not a single protest or a single election,” he wrote. “What we are up against is not just a president or a party; it is a project.”
The right has built organizations, legal strategies, and coordinated campaigns capable of sustaining pressure on institutions over time. The response has to match that scale.
Through his advisory work, Robinson helps organizations understand how these pressure points connect.
“The attack on DEI is the front door to a much larger assault on the rights, protections, and opportunities that communities have fought for over generations,” he wrote. Making discrimination expensive, unpopular, and unsustainable requires infrastructure equal to what is being dismantled. The costs are visible—and rising.
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