The Corporate Retreat
Gil Scott-Heron was right. Corporations won’t save us. They never planned to.
A few weeks ago, Kendrick Lamar lit up the Super Bowl halftime show with a performance that gained another 11 million views after airing. Between prison yard imagery, dancers forming the American flag, and Samuel L. Jackson’s subversive Uncle Sam, one line cut through the spectacle: “The revolution is about to be televised; You picked the right time but the wrong guy.”
The line flips Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 warning — a jazz poet who spoke truth over bass lines in basement clubs when America still pretended Black revolution didn’t exist. Scott-Heron knew change wouldn’t come gift-wrapped from corporate America. Fifty-three years later, we’re watching that prophecy play out with depressing predictability.
Three weeks before Kendrick’s dancers formed a divided flag on national television, the President banned DEI policies through Executive Order. What followed was a master class in corporate cowardice. Within 72 hours, the digital purge began. Blog posts highlighting deaf engineers? Deleted. Celebrations of Black History Month? Vanished. Statements supporting trans employees from summer 2022? Gone like they never existed.
The cynical part of my brain gets it. Companies exist to make money. But corporations didn’t bother distinguishing between banned policies and basic federally protected recognition of their workforce; something an executive order cannot overule. They erased everything — treating their employees’ identities like a liability rather than an asset. The same executives who boasted about “psychological safety” in 2024 suddenly couldn’t recognize their own employees in 2025.
This corporate backpedaling follows a grand American tradition — discrimination that constantly updates its methods while maintaining its core structure. Women couldn’t get credit cards without male cosigners until 1974. Black Americans couldn’t buy homes in certain neighborhoods until 1968. Today, in twenty-three states, you can still be legally fired for being gay. America perpetually redesigns its exclusionary systems while preserving who benefits and who doesn’t.
The organizations that presented themselves as progressive champions pulled back the curtain, revealing the wizard was just a marketing team with a deadline and fear of Fox News backlash.
Scott-Heron was right. Corporations won’t save us. They never planned to.
The truth lives with Katherine Johnson, calculating orbital trajectories at NASA in 1961 while having to walk half a mile to use the “colored” bathroom. With Alan Turing breaking the Enigma code in 1942, saving millions, only to be chemically castrated by Britain in 1952 when discovered to be gay. With Bessie Coleman crossing the Atlantic in 1920, paying 300 francs weekly for French lessons so she could understand flying instructions no American school would provide her.
These pioneers didn’t succeed because of inclusion policies. They succeeded despite institutional barriers designed specifically to break them.
This isn’t to say “they did it, why can’t you?” It’s to recognize that corporate commitment to human dignity lasts only until it’s not profitable to do so. The revolution never arrives via press release or diversity statement written by committee.
In the spirit of Maya Angelou, when companies show you who they are, believe them the first time. The system was never built to protect dignity — it was built to protect profit margins.
The corporations may have retreated to their bunkers of plausible deniability, but the real work continues where it always has — with people too stubborn, too brilliant, or too necessary to wait for permission to exist. No executive order changes that equation.
Of course, views are my own - feel free to borrow them, though I can't imagine why you'd want to