There are nuances surrounding the support of Black-owned businesses in the wake of companies dismantling their DEI efforts.

Walmart and Target are among the major companies that have boldly announced they will scale back their efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion. This list also includes Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Nasa.

“We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect, but every decision comes from a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers, and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone,” Walmart said in a statement, according to AdWeek.

Walmart’s shareholders do not align with its board of directors, expressing “deep disappointment,” as AFROTECH™previously reported.

What’s Going On At Target?

Target has followed suit, placing a red light on its three-year DEI commitment. According to NBC News, the retailer will no longer send reports to an external diversity-focused group and will dismantle its program responsible for shelving Black-owned and minority-owned businesses.

“Many years of data, insights, listening, and learning have been shaping this next chapter in our strategy,” said Kiera Fernandez, chief community impact and equity officer at Target. “And as a retailer that serves millions of consumers every day, we understand the importance of staying in step with the evolving external landscape, now and in the future — all in service of driving Target’s growth and winning together.”

How Black Business Owners Will Be Impacted

How will these decisions impact Black business owners? Target has shelved the products of entrepreneurs such as Melissa Butler, founder of the Lip Bar, as well as Jon Gray, Lester Walker, and Pierre Serra, the team behind Ghetto Gastro. Also featured is Tabitha Brown, who sells a diverse offering of food, cooking, household goods, and kitchen items.

Some Black-owned buyers have stated they plan to boycott companies that will no longer uphold DEI efforts.

“If Target doesn’t believe in DEI, then I don’t believe in Target. Don’t spend @target,” Author and Speaker Lawrence Ross wrote on X in a post that has garnered 29,000 likes and nearly 6,000 reposts (at the time of this writing).

Emmy-nominated producer Ernest Crim III, MA, shared on TikTok that he has taken his dollars to Costco, a company that stands by DEI.

“Target’s anti-DEI stance inspired me to go to Costco Wholesale for the first time, and I was reminded of why I still boycott Denny’s with my family today,” he wrote via LinkedIn on Monday, Jan. 27.

Customers are recognizing the power of their dollars and are responding strategically to recent shifts.

Brown has weighed in on the matter and described the situation at Target as “disheartening,” noting that it will impact not only her self-funded business but also others ahead of Black History Month.

“I’m not the only one affected by this. It’s for everyone who is a woman owned business, minority owned businesses, Black-owned businesses. It’s for so many of us who work so very hard to be placed in retail, to finally be seen and approved for retail because, contrary to whatever the world might tell you, it has been very hard for Black-owned businesses to hit shelves. Which is why such a a big deal when we do finally land inside of retail. So it is definitelyheartbreaking to feel unsupported,” she explained in a video shared on Instagram.

Brown also added that her contract with Target wouldn’t expire for another year. She also works with Walmart and Amazon. While she understands the boycott, she sheds light on its negative implications for those shelved within retailers.

“Even if you sell online, it’s a process when it comes to business. And everyone does not have the funds or the means or the availability, the space, to house their own products, but the thing that concerns me the most, and I want you to hear me and hear me well. If we all decide to stop supporting said businesses and say, you know, ‘I can’t buy nothing from there.’Even the businesses who were affected by the DEI ban, what that does is you take all our sales and they dwindle down and then those companies get to say, ‘Oh, your products are not performing.’ And they can remove them from the shelves, and then put their preferred businesses on the shelves. And then what happens to all the businesses who’ve worked so hard to get where they are? Then what happens,” she explained.

Ownership offers a pathway for minority-owned businesses to sustain cash flow in their operations, independent of attention from major corporations. However, establishing an entity equivalent to a large e-commerce platform like Amazon or a retailer like Target — operating both online and through physical storefronts with various brands at the hands of millions of consumers daily — will require time and significant effort, and as Butler puts it support from the Black community.

“I’ve seen a lot of people, like, ‘This is why we need our own Target, or this is why we need our own Walmart,’ which is true, but do you know why we don’t have our own Target? Do you know why we don’t have our own Walmart? Because we barely shop Black brands,” Butler, who owns a storefront in Detroit, MI, said in an Instagram video. “If we’re gonna be honest, if you do and you that’s great, but you are probably 1 in a 1000000. As for the Lip Bar, we’re constantly competing to tell people to shop the Lip Bar over Charlotte Tilbury or the Lip Bar over MAC or the Lip Bar over NYX or e.l.f. etc.  So the reason why we don’t have these powerhouse brands is because our support is finicky.”

Butler added, “So, for the people who are like, ‘Just leave Target, and we’re gonna shop you on our .com,’ I would love that. We make more money on our .com than we do in any other channel. But guess what? In 2020, when it was cool to shop Black-owned businesses, We all got an inflated sense of support for about 3 months. And then by the end of the year, we had all this extra inventory. Some people had hired a bunch of people. And guess what? It wasn’t cool to shop Black anymore. So some people are upset with me for being honest that if and when people don’t shop in retail, it will impact our sales. It’s just a fact. I’m not telling you to shop at Target. I don’t care where you shop. Don’t shop at all…I’m just being honest with you that it will be affected.”