Ramstad: After Trump’s threats, can you blame Target for giving up on DEI?

Virtue signaling is out in American businesses. Zeitgeist signaling is in.

Business leaders cozy up to the winner of every presidential election. Donald Trump made it very clear that he expected nothing less, threatening to use tariffs, government investigations and his bully pulpit against businesses that upset him.

That’s why executives joined foreign leaders in a parade to Mar-a-Lago following Trump’s victory. Leaders of the biggest tech companies flanked the Trump family at last week’s inauguration.

Target Corp., pillar of Minnesota’s business scene and a national bellwether on corporate culture, on Friday showed it recognized the change in the zeitgeist by publicly announcing a reshaping of its diversity efforts with employees, suppliers and partners.

Trump’s election swung the pendulum in the nation’s conversation on race in the direction of people like him who believe discrimination from the past cannot be remedied with discrimination in the present.

As a result, programs on DEI — the umbrella term for “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts — are being canceled throughout federal government. Trump sees them as discriminating against white people.

In an executive order signed the day after he took office, Trump directed the Justice Department and other federal agencies to identify “the most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners” in their jurisdiction.

This is one bull’s-eye Target wants to avoid.

DEI programs came to prominence following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis five years ago. Twin Cities business leaders in the weeks after Floyd’s death took the lead in a reckoning over business practices that hurt Black people like Floyd, and other people of color.

Like many corporate efforts with a hazy connection to the bottom line, the speeches and the DEI campaigns that followed swung from helpful to excessive. At best, they made managers and employees more aware of how biases can hurt business.

On the downside, DEI workshops were often more performative than effective. They sometimes led to lower performance standards. And in some workplaces, particularly academia, DEI became a quasi-religious movement.

Conservative activists for years fought DEI and other do-good efforts they believe conflict with free-market fundamentalism, including CSR (corporate social responsibility), ESG (environmental, social, governance), socially responsible investing and values-based investing.

Beyond the name-calling, both sides of the national conversation over race, fairness and the workplace have weaknesses in their arguments that participants rarely acknowledge.

For DEI proponents, there’s a numbers problem. Such programs are designed to help people of color overcome longstanding barriers in hiring, starting a business or developing skills.

That’s justifiable considering, on a percentage basis, more Americans who are Black, Hispanic and native live in poverty and need a leg up than their white neighbors.

It’s less justifiable when considering absolute numbers. The total number of white people in poverty in the U.S. is 2.5 times greater than Black Americans, census data shows.

It’s a complexity Martin Luther King Jr. recognized back in the 1960s, as I was reminded by some of the news coverage around last week’s MLK Day holiday.

The U.S. continues to struggle with lifting up the poor no matter their race. But critics of DEI programs face a contradiction and challenge that didn’t exist in King’s day.

In a growing number of states, the white population is now falling. Economic growth comes from people of color, especially immigrants, in those places.

As I wrote in a series of columns last summer, Minnesota turned that corner early in the 2010s. The state’s economic prosperity depends more than ever on the ability of Minnesotans of color to grow their wealth.

In that series, I wrote I was skeptical that it’s possible to correct past unfairness in a fair way.

Trump and other DEI critics think past injustices should only be fixed through methods that are fair to all, including white people.