Last week, Target CEO Brian Cornell requested a meeting with Rev. Al Sharpton, presumably hoping to mitigate the massive fallout from Target’s decision to roll back its DEI initiatives, including a three-year program that focused on building Black careers with a $2 billion investment.
According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, that meeting took place Thursday in New York, and Sharpton characterized it as “very constructive and candid,” but other activists are calling BS on that claim, suggesting that the whole thing was performative nonsense inspired by 10 consecutive weeks of reduced foot traffic at the retail chain due to massive boycotts. (So, for people who claim boycotts don’t work, here’s a little proof for your pudding.)
“I am going to inform our allies, including Rev. Dr. Jamal Bryant, of our discussion, what my feelings are, and we will go from there,” Sharpton said in the statement.
In March, Dr. Jamal Bryant, the lead pastor at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, organized a national 40-day boycott of Target and other businesses that rolled back their DEI programs in an apparent bid to follow the unofficial marching orders of President Donald Trump, as well as a “buy-in” campaign for those companies’ pro-DEI competitors.
Bryant was, to say the absolute least, unmoved by Sharpton’s meeting with Cornell, despite the latter’s apparent pledge to “invest $2 billion into black-owned businesses” by the end of summer.
From The Christian Post:
Bryant, who leads the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, told congregants at his church on Sunday that he had a different impression of the meeting.
“Ladies and gentlemen you already have read the report that a meeting took place and in that meeting I wanted to share with you the outcome of it. We had four asks and only walked away with one thing. I want to tell you what that one thing is. Target has agreed that by July the 31st they will complete the pledge of $2 billion for black business,” he said.
“But the other three things we have no commitment on and we don’t have anything to stand on because their currency does not ride with us,” he added.
The Georgia pastor who called Target’s DEI rollback a “spit in the face of black people” insisted to his congregants on Sunday that their boycott had caused the share price of the company to tumble.
“When we started this Target fast, a trillion dollar company, a Fortune 500 company, was trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $138 a share. Because of how it is, that stridently you have put your hand to the plow, their stock started at $138 a share. As of Friday, it is down to $94 a share,” Bryant declared while erroneously suggesting that Target is a trillion company. Target shares were trading around $93 on Monday.
“Foot traffic at Target has gone down by 7.9 percent. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you will share with me in your enthusiasm for people who thought it was ineffective and there would be no results, is that because of your fast Target has lost $12 billion. Come on, y’all ought to be shouting,” he continued to applause.
“They tried to put out a statement that their loss is because of the economy, because of tariffs with China, but the reality is that while they were losing, Costco was gaining,” he asserted.
In addition to the demand that Target honors its $2 billion pledge to the black business community “through products, services, and black media buys,” the Target Fast campaign, which Bryant calls a “grassroots movement” also called on the retailer to: deposit “250 million amongst any of our 23 black banks;” restore “the franchise commitment to DEI;” and “pipeline community centers at 10 HBCU to teach retail business at every level.”
Bryant claimed that Target’s offer to commit to only one of the demands is not enough to appease the black community.
“If in all of these years we have been loyal customers and clients and then in the moment of ‘dis-ease’ you turn your back. And so, I had to share with Target that we gave you 40 days to answer four, not one. And they only came back with one. So I told them what I’m getting ready to tell you. We ain’t going back in there. And so, the fast shifts to a full out boycott,” he declared.
Bryant isn’t the only activist who appears to see right through Target’s post-anti-DEI pandering campaign.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the activists who originally called for the boycott, according to the Tribune, called the meeting an attempt by Target’s leadership to “control the narrative” and questioned why Sharpton was the one Cornell reached out to in the first place.
“It’s unclear to us as Twin Cities organizers why Target CEO Brian Cornell would call for a meeting with the Reverend Al Sharpton given the fact that Sharpton has absolutely zero involvement in the Target boycott,” Levy Armstrong said.
She has a point. For years, white America has been acting like Sharpton is Black America’s official spokesman. Sure, he’s a widely recognizable public figure who is consistently outspoken about anti-Black racism in America, but that doesn’t make him the universal negro whisperer, nor does a meeting with him equate to a correspondence with the Black collective.
Of course, while it’s true he had nothing to do with organizing the boycott against Target, in January, Sharpton did spearhead a campaign he called a “buy-cott,” in which he led a group of about 100 people, including fellow Black civil rights activists, to spend their money at Costco in East Harlem, New York, to reward the company for publicly refused to cave to Trump’s pressure to go anti-DEI.
Still, Sharpton can’t help Target put the white grievance genie back in the anti-DEI bottle, and Target can’t hope to undo the damage it has done by doing the bare minimum.
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