In the summer of 2020, every major corporation in America posted a black square on Instagram. Statements were issued. Pledges were made. Chief Diversity Officers were hired at salaries that suggested the commitment was serious. Billions were allocated to programmes, partnerships, and initiatives that would, the press releases promised, transform the workplace.
By early 2025, most of it was gone.
Meta dismantled its DEI programmes. Google scaled back diversity hiring targets. Amazon quietly shelved inclusion initiatives. Corporate America didn’t just retreat from DEI — it sprinted. The same companies that had competed to demonstrate their commitment now competed to demonstrate their distance.
The speed was the tell. You cannot dismantle a genuine conviction in eighteen months. You can dismantle a market position overnight.
The comfortable nonsense was never “diversity matters.” Diversity does matter — the evidence for diverse teams outperforming homogeneous ones under complex conditions is robust. The comfortable nonsense was the belief that corporate America adopted DEI because of the evidence.
They adopted it because George Floyd was murdered on camera and the cultural pressure was unbearable. They dropped it because Donald Trump was elected and the political pressure reversed. The behaviour was identical in both directions: organisations protecting themselves from the dominant force of the moment.
This is the protection problem at cultural scale. The same dynamic that makes a leader agree in the meeting and undermine in the corridor makes a corporation pledge in the press release and retreat in the quarterly review. Protection doesn’t have values. It has calculations. And the calculation changed.
What was lost in the retreat is not what most people think. The programmes were mostly theatre anyway — unconscious bias training that multiple meta-analyses showed had no lasting impact on behaviour, diversity targets that changed the numbers without changing the culture, inclusion workshops that made people feel they were doing something while the power structures remained untouched.
What was lost was the permission to name the problem. Before 2020, it was difficult to talk about systemic exclusion in corporate settings. After 2020, there was a brief window. After 2025, the window closed harder than before. Not because the exclusion disappeared. Because the language for describing it became politically dangerous.
The conspiracy of silence around inclusion is now deeper than it was before the corporate world pretended to care. The people who were told their experience mattered have now been told, through action rather than words, that it mattered temporarily and conditionally.
The black squares are still on Instagram. Nobody has deleted them. Nobody needs to. Everyone understands they no longer mean anything. That understanding is the damage.