A prominent Atlanta megachurch pastor is calling on the Black community to boycott Target for 40 days in retaliation for the company ditching its diversity, equity and inclusion policies upon President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The so-called “Target fast” spearheaded by Rev. Jamal Bryant, who has more than 800,000 followers on Instagram and promoted the campaign across several media outlets, kicks off Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and lasts the duration of the Christian observance period.
“We’re protesting with our pocketbooks,” Bryant told Atlanta News First.
In a Wednesday interview with the popular radio show “The Breakfast Club,” Bryant explained why the boycott is focused on Target ― for now.
“People are asking why did we pick Target, when Walmart’s out of order, McDonald’s is out of order, John Deere’s out of order, Bank of America’s out of order, Amazon is out of order,” he said.
Bryant pointed to Target being headquartered in Minneapolis, the same city where George Floyd was killed in 2020. After Floyd’s death, Target made a series of racial reckoning pledges, including one to increase its Black workforce by 20%.
That’s one of the DEI initiatives the company announced last month it was dropping.
“They dishonored that commitment,” Bryant said on the radio show.
He also pointed to the size of Target’s Black customer base. One academic told CNN that Black Americans make up roughly 9% of consumer spending at Target.
But not everyone is on board with a boycott. Melissa Butler, whose makeup brand The Lip Bar has been in Target since 2017, raised concerns about the practice in a now-viral TikTok she posted shortly after Target dropped its DEI policy.
“The immediate risk is if all of our consumers boycott Target, then that will absolutely impact us,” she said, saying she’s seen Target drop brands when they don’t perform well on shelves.
“It’s a really shitty situation to be in,” she said.
Butler added that she’s “disappointed but not that surprised” that Target reneged on its DEI commitments, saying, “Trump is emboldening companies to reverse commitments that they never wanted to do in the first place.”
The founders of Rucker Roots, another Black-owned beauty brand carried in Target, also expressed some concern about a boycott in an appearance on “The Breakfast Club” last month.
In his appearance on the radio show Wednesday, Bryant said the campaign’s website would direct people to other retailers stocking products from Black-owned businesses. But, he conceded, “A movement comes with inconvenience.”
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“This is a spiritual warfare that we’re under with [Vice President] JD Vance and Donald Trump,” Bryant said to emphasize the seriousness of Target ditching its DEI commitments.
Diversity initiatives have become one of Trump’s biggest punching bags since he took office earlier this year. He even went so far as to baselessly blame DEI for a deadly plane crash in Washington, D.C., in January. He also mentioned the policies in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, ranting about the end of “wokeness.”
“We are getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military, and it’s already out, and it’s out of our society, we don’t want it,” Trump said. “Wokeness is trouble, wokeness is bad, it’s gone. It’s gone. And we feel so much better for it, don’t we? Don’t we feel better?”