Posted on 09/08/2024 5:20:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Last month, Brown-Forman Corporation, the parent company of Jack Daniels, announced that it would scale back the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that critics say violate nondiscrimination law. Specifically, the company stated that it would no longer pursue “quantitative workforce and supplier diversity ambitions,” effectively ending efforts to engineer a specific corporate demography via racial and gender quotas.
Compensation will now be tied strictly to business performance, the company added, rather than to metrics that incentivize discrimination. Brown-Forman also pledged to review all training programs to ensure they align with the firm’s “evolved strategy,” signaling a potential departure from the more aggressive DEI training methods commonplace in corporate America.
Two days earlier, Harley-Davidson made a similar pivot. The motorcycle giant announced the end of its “supplier diversity goals,” according to which it had considered suppliers’ race when allocating contracts. Harley also dissolved its “DEI function” and vowed that future workforce training would be directly related to business needs, devoid of what it termed “socially motivated content.”
The growing number of corporations pledging to abandon “antiracist” policies and to restore the primacy of profit-seeking is encouraging. Only time will tell if their statements are sincere. While we wait to find out, it’s worth considering another detail of this reversal: Why now?
The efforts of activists and journalists like Robby Starbuck and my colleague Christopher Rufo have played an important role in these developments. Their work has exposed discriminatory corporate policies and raised public awareness to a critical mass.
A more cynical interpretation, however, may help explain these decisions, too. Corporate decisionmakers may be pulling back from “woke” initiatives because they care more about legal exposure than they do about ideology.
Courts are ever-more willing to hold executives responsible for racial discrimination. In a little-noted consensus, at least eight of the 13 U.S. Courts of Appeals—all those taking a position on the issue so far—have agreed that the individuals who participate in racial contracting discrimination are liable for the harms caused, even if a lawyer signed off on the practice. Since the 1970s, that liability has extended to directors who vote for discriminatory policies.
State actions have had the same effect. State laws across the country hold officers and directors personally liable for knowing violations of the law, regardless of whether those decisionmakers thought that law-breaking would be profitable. Plus, an open letter from 13 state attorneys general, published in July 2023, reminded corporate America that DEI-inspired discrimination is illegal. And state laws generally bar corporations and insurers from covering the damages awarded to plaintiffs for intentional law violations. In other words, personal liability for racial discrimination threatens to be really personal.
American law increasingly holds corporate officials personally liable for their companies’ discriminatory actions, as I elaborate in a new law review article. For years, business schools and corporate summits have been obsessed with DEI, despite the legal risks that such policies entail. Now, as corporate leaders become more aware of the potential personal consequences for racial discrimination, they are reconsidering their positions. They seem to get that they are, quite literally, on the hook.
As this awareness spreads, it will become harder for holdouts to deny that they’ve knowingly violated the law. Thus, corporate decisionmakers should consider the mounting risks of declining to challenge their “woke” institutional investors.
Those managers may like to hear about environmental, social, and governance initiatives, for example, but corporate leaders should ask themselves whether it’s worth betting their own savings and homes on the legitimacy of ESG-related requests. It isn’t.
Executives of corporations beholden to DEI should pivot accordingly—while they still can.
Maybe corporations are ditching wokeness to avoid brokeness by making their customers gag with revulsion at their leftist idiocy.
If true then Disney executives should all be sued since they opening (and proudly) discriminate against whites and straight males of any color or race.
I hate to put Jack Daniels on my boycott list. I guess I’ll be buying Metaxa (7 star) instead. 😉
So...they are de-transitioning?
Although, if they had the surgery the best they can hope for is to be a shell of your former self.
So...they are de-transitioning?
Although, if they had the surgery the best they can hope for is to be a shell of their former self.
Define “Equity” in a way that isn’t exactly stealing from productive whitey and giving to lazy blackey.
Go.
Trust, but verify. No, wait. Verify before you trust!!
Horrible management waking up?
Are they really ditching woke...
...or just renaming it?
Trust but verify.
BTTT
“State laws across the country hold officers and directors personally liable for knowing violations of the law, ..”
Imagine that…
I think Disney considers that “Restorative justice”…… yep it’s a disease those people have
I was surprised to see a Bud Lite ad during a football game the other day.
DEI = Discrimination and Abuse against whites
Their accountants have been heard finally.
$ power is powerful.
I don’t drink Jack Daniels because I don’t like it. It’s too sour. I prefer Japanese whiskey.
Maybe publicly they are, but behind the scenes, I suspect it’s still going strong.
CDT/DEI are inherently racist, and therefore illegal. Discriminatory is negligible compared to that. If Execs are just realizing that, both they and their legal departments should be purged.
Mind, legal depts are inherently corrupt if the individuals are not held personally liable for unprofessional advice. I use to work for a big company in CaCaLand. They got sued for negligence in keeping care of their power lines — which led to ~20 homes being destroyed by a fire. Now homeless families took them to court. Near the end someone leaked a memo from Legal to Ops — saying basically: “If the fines for breaking the law are less than the gains, go for it.”
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