A tally of public promises compiled by consultants Creative Investment Research (CIR) found that 271 US corporations have pledged $67bn towards racial equity since Floyd’s murder, with funds to be used for everything from overhauling their own internal recruiting and inclusion programmes to investing in communities of colour and donating to civil rights organisations. But only $652m of those funds had actually been disbursed by the start of 2022, CIR found.
“After the initial excitement around the corporate pledges, they basically have petered out,” says William Michael Cunningham, CIR’s chief executive. “They haven’t really done anything that would lead one to believe that they are committed, with some exceptions.”
One of those exceptions,
Cunningham says, is Microsoft, which launched what it calls its Racial
Equity Initiative in June 2020. The technology giant says it is nearing its
goals for increasing the amount of business it does with black-owned financial
institutions and suppliers.
Other companies have been slower. Some of the delay may be due to the immense logistical task of distributing billions of dollars, as corporations search for third-party partners, such as non-profits and community development financial institutions, to administer their donations.
But many black Americans say little of this has improved their professional lives. Some have expressed unease at corporate America’s hasty embrace of Juneteenth and Congress’s relatively speedy approval of it while police reform legislation remains stalled. Black entrepreneurs say they still face substantial hurdles to accessing funding. Job switchers commonly cite insufficient DEI initiatives among their top reasons for quitting.
CIR’s Cunningham says his firm’s analysis of corporate racial justice pledges has left him doubtful that DEI work remains high on the corporate agenda. He has filed a petition with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that regulates publicly traded corporations in the US, to create a rule that would mandate companies to disclose their progress on such pledges in their annual reports.
Cunningham says a business making unfulfilled racial
equity pledges is like a company that markets a revolutionary new product to
investors, enjoys a rising share price as a result, but never actually delivers
the goods.
“The SEC would definitely declare that to be fraud,”
Cunningham says. “The idea is to make that analogy with respect to these Black
Lives Matter pledges — the same type of conditionality approach and holding
these guys’ feet to the fire should apply to these pledges.”
Online at: https://www.ft.com/content/f29449c1-aa80-40b3-9794-5b02bb557019