Republicans are escalating their legal threats against Target, pressuring the company to remove merchandise for transgender customers and backtrack on its initiatives to hire minorities and diversify vendors. Here's more.
, pressuring the company to remove merchandise for transgender customers and backtrack on its initiatives to hire minorities and diversify vendors. In singling out Target, GOP lawmakers and right-wing social media personalities are sending a larger warning to corporate America to roll back recent diversity and inclusion policies, analysts say.
“Target is a high-profile company, one of the biggest, so if you want to make a statement this would have that impact,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He said pressure on Target could be an effort for the GOP to appeal to its base. Although there isn’t always a clean political connection with corporate targets, Target in the past has been linked to “coastal upper middle-class America, an alternative to Walmart. So I think this is part of the same anti-Democratic elite rhetoric that we see,” Zelizer said. Target's Pride clothing collection drew anti-LGBTQ backlash on social media. - Brandon Bell/Getty Imagesfor president, wrote a letter last week to Target saying the company’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pledge in 2020 to increase Black employees by 20% and invest more than $2 billion in Black-owned businesses was racially discriminatory. Target first began its diversity initiatives 20 years ago and added new policies in 2020. But Cotton’s letter came in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that gutted affirmative action in college admissions, saying colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis. Cotton cited the Supreme Court decision in his letter. The decision ended a long-standing precedent that has helped Black and Latino students gain access to higher education. Andra Gillespie, a professor of political science at Emory University, noted that Walmart, Target’s chief rival, was headquartered in Cotton’s home state of Arkansas.“It’s virtue signaling. He’s taking on a culture war issue. He’s going after a company that has already been targeted by Republicans and joining the pile-on,” she said.warning that merchandise in its Pride month product collection could violate their states’ child protection laws. The letter followed an anti-LGBTQ campaign against Target that went viral on social media. Fueled by far-right personalities, the anti-trans campaign spread misleading information about the company’s Pride product collection and its business practices. Target subsequently chose to remove certain items that it said caused the most “volatile” reaction from opponents. Target did not respond to comment on Sen. Cotton or the attorneys general letter. But Target has said its employees have endured threats over the Pride Month collection and that the company stands by the LGBTQ community. Hurting brands’ sales and reputations was the stated goal of the campaign against Target: “The goal is to make ‘pride’ toxic for brands,”
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