What Leave the World Behind Reveals About Corporate Morality and the Death of DEI
The Slow Undoing of Progress in Corporate America
Welcome to The Media Room 📺—where I dive into the themes behind the movies, shows, and cultural moments that shape the world of art and entertainment.
By now, you've probably seen the headlines—Target is the latest corporation, alongside Meta, Amazon, Walmart, McDonald's, and others, to scale back its DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives. For those looking for receipts1, here’s a quote from their recent Belonging at The Bullseye Strategy press release, published on their website on January 25th:
Throughout 2025, we’ll be accelerating action in key areas and implementing changes with the goal of driving growth and staying in step with the evolving external landscape. We will continue to monitor and adjust as needed. Current actions include:
Concluding our three-year diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
Concluding our Racial Equity Action and Change (REACH) initiatives in 2025 as planned.
Ensuring our employee resource groups are communities fully focused on development and mentorship. These communities will continue to be open to all.
Further evaluating our corporate partnerships to ensure they are directly connected to our roadmap for growth.
Stopping all external diversity-focused surveys, including HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.
Evolving our “Supplier Diversity” team to “Supplier Engagement” to better reflect our inclusive global procurement process across a broad range of suppliers, including increasing our focus on small businesses.
If Target’s decision to scale back its DEI initiatives surprises you, it shouldn’t. Corporate commitments to social responsibility often last only as long as they’re convenient. When diversity stops being a marketing flex and starts affecting the bottom line, companies quickly return to business as usual.
This corporate backslide isn’t just about Target—it’s part of a larger pattern. It exposes how corporations use DEI initiatives to cultivate brand loyalty, creating the illusion of meaningful progress. Progress that suggests a better society—one where everyone has access to economic prosperity and upward mobility. But is that actually happening? Or is the change we believe in just a mirage, fragile and fleeting?
If you’ve seen Leave the World Behind, you already know—the illusion of stability is just that: an illusion.
The Illusion of Inclusion & Who Gets Left Behind
In Leave the World Behind, society doesn’t collapse all at once. It erodes in ways that are easy to ignore at first. A blackout. A strange email outage. A car that won’t start. A migration of deer. A sense that something is off but no clear explanation why. That’s how systems fail—not in a dramatic instant, but in subtle ways until suddenly, the safety nets we relied on are gone.
Take the scene where the Stanford family is on the beach. An oil tanker drifts toward the shore—slowly at first, almost imperceptibly. There’s an assumption it will stop. It’s supposed to stop, right? But it doesn’t. And if you don’t move, the impact will be catastrophic.
The same creeping inevitability is happening with corporate DEI. First, budgets were quietly cut. Then, entire teams were dissolved. Now, corporations are abandoning diversity efforts outright—treating them like the black squares they posted on Instagram in 2020 before scrolling back to business as usual. Now that the era of performative activism is over, are we also seeing the illusion of inclusion?
DEI Does Not Mean Black
One of the biggest misconceptions about DEI is that it exists solely to benefit Black people. In reality, DEI programs are designed to create more equitable and inclusive environments that support everyone—and strengthen organizations as a whole. Some of the key beneficiaries include:
Women – DEI initiatives promote gender equity, ensuring fair treatment and increased opportunities.
LGBTQ+ Individuals – Inclusive policies create workplaces where LGBTQ+ employees feel respected, and valued.
People with Disabilities – DEI efforts drive accessibility improvements and workplace accommodations.
Veterans – Recognizing the unique skills of veterans helps them transition into civilian careers.
Older Employees – DEI addresses ageism and values the experience of older professionals.
Humans. Because ultimately, DEI fosters psychological safety—allowing people from all walks of life to make mistakes, learn, and grow without fear of criticism and retaliation.
Critics argue that DEI programs disrupt the so-called “natural” hiring process or create unfair advantages. But these arguments stem from a desire to maintain an old system that already favors certain groups. Just as Leave the World Behind exposes the cracks in society’s infrastructure, the unraveling of DEI exposes the deeper inequities within corporate America.
In the film, Rose encounters a migration of deer—an unsettling, symbolic moment that hints at a much larger environmental and systemic failure. Similarly, the demise of DEI exposes an uncomfortable truth about corporate culture: These programs were never about real, lasting change. They were about optics and consumer loyalty, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s murder—when Target first launched its DEI goals and REACH initiative. Now, as DEI efforts crumble, we’re left to confront the biases that were never truly addressed—only concealed.
Corporate Morality in Crisis & Where We Go From Here
Leave the World Behind doesn’t offer a neat resolution—because real collapse doesn’t come with a satisfying ending. Instead, it leaves us with an unsettling question:
What happens when the systems we depend on stop working?
What happens when corporations make it clear that social responsibility was never the priority?
We’re about to find out.
Have You Seen Leave The World Behind?
What themes from this piece resonated with you? Leave a comment and stay tuned for Friday’s email: Reflect & Release!