Some companies are retooling diversity, inclusion programs
Conservatives target initiatives
NEW YORK — Advocates of diversity efforts are steeling themselves for a fight this year as a growing number of lawsuits take aim at programs intended to advance racial equity in the corporate world.
Lawsuits making their way through the courts have targeted prominent companies and a wide array of diversity initiatives, including fellowships, hiring goals, anti-bias training and contract programs for minority or women-owned businesses. Most have been filed by conservative activists who have been encouraged by the Supreme Court’s June ruling ending affirmative action in college admissions and are seeking to set a similar precedent in the workplace.
The battle has been a roller coaster of setbacks and victories for both sides, but some companies are already retooling their diversity programs in the face of legal challenges, and the expectation that the conservativedominated Supreme Court will eventually take up the issue.
“There’s a dragnet that I think we should all be concerned about,” said Alphonso David, President & CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum and a legal counsel for the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that is facing a lawsuit over a grant program for businesses owned by Black women.
“It’s all coordinated to reverse existing law and advance a chilling effect throughout many industries,” David said.
One conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, claimed a victory this month with the resignation of Harvard’s first Black woman president, Claudine Gay, after allegations of plagiarism and a furor over her congressional testimony about antisemitism.
Rufo, who has cast Gay’s appointment to the job as the culmination of misguided diversity and inclusion efforts, vowed on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, not to “stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America.”
Civil Rights advocates are fighting back. On Monday, the National Action Network, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, plans to announce a national drive to defend diversity programs at an annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Washington.
Sharpton and other prominent civil rights activist have rallied around the Fearless Fund as it fights a lawsuit brought by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, a group founded by antiaffirmative action activist Edward Blum, the man behind the college admissions cases the Supreme Court ruled on in June. The lawsuit alleges that one of the Fearless Fund’s grant contests discriminates against non-Black women and asks the courts to imagine a similar program designed only for white applicants.
In late September, a federal judge in Atlanta refused to block the contest, saying the grants are donations protected by the First Amendment and the lawsuit was likely to fail. But days later, a three-judge federal appeals panel suspended the contest, calling it “racially exclusionary” and saying the suit was likely to succeed.
Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for Jan. 31. The outcome of the case could be a bellwether for similar diversity programs.
Most major companies have so far stuck by diversity initiatives. Starbucks and Disney are among companies that have so far prevailed in court against challenges to their Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies.
But some have made changes to diversity programs to try to protect them from legal scrutiny.
Among those are two prominent law firms that had faced lawsuits by Blum’s group. The firms, Morrison Foerster and Perkins Coie, opened their diversity fellowship programs to all applicants of all races in October, changes the companies said were in the works before Blum’s lawsuits, which he subsequently dropped.
In May, Comcast said business owners of all backgrounds would be eligible to apply for a grant program originally intended for women and people of color when it launched in 2020.