Pepsi is reportedly walking back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Conservative news accounts paint it as a significant move. But is it? The multi-national soda behemoth is fully plugged into a dense, complex, and tightly constructed global effort to enact social change that won’t go away anytime soon.
Social media activist Robby Starbuck has successfully pressured several big-name companies into winding down a DEI craze that suddenly seems woefully outdated. Pepsi is his latest scalp. “PepsiCo will no longer have a DEI officer,” Starbuck wrote in a Feb. 20 X post. “PepsiCo will no longer have a DEI team. PepsiCo will end DEI representation goals.”
It sounds good, but is this anything more than a savvy corporation ditching a brand that tapped into a fad that turned stale? DEI may be in retreat, but the spider web that brought it into workplaces nationwide remains omnipresent at Pepsi.
CEO Ramon Laguarta, who penned the letter to employees announcing the DEI rollback cited by Starbuck, was an outspoken zealot in the corporate crusade against “structural racism” in 2020.
“As people around the world demand justice for George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and far too many others, we have been thinking hard about how PepsiCo can help dismantle the systemic racial barriers that for generations have blocked social and economic progress for Black people in this country,” Laguarta wrote in an article for Fortune.
“We know that the first step toward change is to speak up, so I want to be very clear: Black Lives Matter, to our company and to me,” he stressed. It wasn’t just talk. The company lavished $400 million on a five-year investment to “address issues of inequality.”
