Walmart announced Monday that it will discontinue its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs for staff and no longer consider race and gender when choosing suppliers.
The retailer will also shut down a racial equity center it established after George Floyd's death in 2020 and withdraw from the Human Rights Campaign's annual LGBT benchmark index, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. In addition to the DEI shift, Walmart pledged to review all Pride-related funding and monitor its online marketplace to remove sexual or transgender-themed products aimed at children, according to USA Today.
The move comes after conservative activist Robby Starbuck led a pressure campaign against major businesses over their DEI programs and other progressive initiatives. Starbuck has successfully pushed companies like Boeing, Ford, Tractor Supply, and John Deere to revise or scale back their DEI policies, according to the Post.
"Removing wokeness from Walmart has both downstream effects on suppliers and it sets the tone for corporate America," Starbuck told USA Today.
"This is the biggest win yet for our movement," Starbuck wrote on X.
Starbuck said he and Walmart executives had "productive conversations" to make changes after he informed the company last week that he would be "doing a story on wokeness there."
A Walmart spokeswoman, however, said many of the DEI changes had been in the works for a long time and were not a result of the company's conversation with Starbuck.
"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," the company said in a statement Monday.
Starbuck attributed Walmart's DEI reversal to Donald Trump's victory in this year's presidential election.
The election was "a referendum on wokeness," Starbuck told the Post. "I think there's a lot of executives who woke up after that election going, 'We have got some policies to get rid of.' We become an easy excuse for them to do it."