The distinction Rashad Robinson drew in his March 2026 newsletter was precise. Last year, he wrote, was the year of rollbacks: program eliminations, institutional retreats, the quiet removal of legal guardrails. The year now underway is something else: “the year of advancing discrimination.”
Rollbacks leave tracks. They can be documented, challenged in court, and reversed when political conditions shift. Normalization works differently. It embeds discrimination into institutional expectations and public policy in ways that have no single reversal point.
Robinson, a social justice leader and Founder and President of Rashad Robinson Advisors (RRA), has spent the past year arguing that neither the corporate retreats from DEI nor their downstream effects on workers are accidental. They’re the output of a coordinated anti-equity infrastructure, built over years, now operating with federal tailwind. The same mechanics, he argues, can produce movement in the other direction.
The First Year’s Toll
The numbers from 2025 are documented. Nearly 300,000 Black women left the labor force in the first half of the year alone. Black unemployment reached 8 percent, roughly double the white rate of 3.9 percent. More than 69,000 federal positions were cut by mid-year, disproportionately affecting equity-related work and the Black women who held those jobs.
Major corporations moved in the same direction. Meta terminated its DEI programs entirely. Verizon eliminated all DEI-focused HR roles. Goldman Sachs removed diversity considerations for board membership through an agreement with the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-wing anti-labor organization that has spent years pressuring corporations to abandon equity commitments. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission dropped its use of disparate impact investigations, removing one of the few legal mechanisms capable of reaching discrimination embedded in policies that appear neutral on their face.
Robinson traces the underlying pattern to an older example. When Paycheck Protection Program funds moved through the banking system without equity requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, banks directed relief money overwhelmingly to white-owned businesses. “When there is nothing in place to ensure fairness, the default is discrimination,” he wrote in NewsOne. Research he cites from the post-DEI corporate record confirms the same pattern: 57 percent of companies that cut DEI initiatives reported hiring declines for historically excluded groups, including a 37 percent drop in hiring women of color and a 33 percent drop for men of color.
Three Pressure Points
Robinson’s framework for addressing the rollback rests on three interlocking levers: consumer pressure, financial accountability, and local organizing.
Consumer pressure, in his analysis, has to work in both directions: it must punish retreat and reward those who hold. The Feb. 28, 2025 Economic Blackout called on Americans to pull spending from major retailers that had abandoned DEI commitments. The NAACP simultaneously released a Black Consumer Advisory, framing the community’s estimated $1.7 trillion in annual buying power as a direct accountability tool. Costco, which rejected a right-wing shareholder proposal demanding it report the “risks” of its diversity policies, drew consumers practicing a “buy-cott.” Shareholders backed the board’s position with 98 percent of votes.
Rashad and his team have built campaigns on this logic for years, cultivating relationships with corporate decision-makers and reshaping the financial calculus around inaction. “Making change inside of big institutions is hard,” Robinson told Fast Company. The goal is to make inaction more expensive than movement.
The second pressure point is the financial layer. Robinson points to investor Bill Ackman as an illustration of how anti-DEI rhetoric acquires institutional credibility. After Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned, Ackman described DEI as “inherently racist and illegal,” language that helped legitimize broader corporate retreat. “There is nothing neutral about financing a backlash,” Robinson wrote. Goldman’s agreement with the National Legal and Policy Center showed how coordinated right-wing pressure moves financial institutions without generating the kind of market logic that would normally explain such a decision. “Corporate behavior is not inevitable—it’s responsive,” Robinson wrote. “And right now, it is responding to the wrong people.”
The third lever is local organizing. ICE operations in January 2026 generated outrage that residents did not channel into national petitions alone. They brought specific demands to local businesses and officials with names, addresses, and visible stakes in the community response. Pressure of that kind is harder to deflect than appeals to distant institutions. “When communities organize where they live, where they shop, and where they work, we can move faster and win more,” Robinson wrote. Local campaigns, coordinated and amplified, produce national signals.
What 2026 Looks Like
Robinson draws a concrete line between what happened in 2025 and what he expects this year. Public statements from administration officials about “male standards” and appearance requirements, he argues, are groundwork for policies that actively target Black people, women, and marginalized groups, policies designed to present exclusion as principled governance. “If year one was about canceling programs and intimidating institutions,” he wrote, “year two will be about making discrimination look normal and permanent.”
He recently hosted a Freedom Table conversation on NewsOne with NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director-Counsel Janai Nelson, author Michael Harriot, and Global Black Economic Forum CEO Alphonso David to examine how the rollback has moved across corporate and civic institutions.
Through his advisory work at Rashad Robinson Advisors, Robinson helps organizations map where these pressure points connect and how to deploy them in combination.
“The answer is not a single protest or a single election,” he wrote. “What we are up against is not just a president or a party; it is a project.” The opposition has built organizations, legal strategies, and coordinated campaigns designed to sustain institutional pressure over years. “The attack on DEI is the front door to a much larger assault on the rights, protections, and opportunities that communities have fought for over generations.” Making discrimination expensive, unpopular, and unsustainable requires infrastructure of comparable scope and durability.
