Corporations as Category-Makers
Essay · Atinuke O. Adediran on How Corporate Language Defines, Measures, and Now Erases Racial Categories
How Do Corporations Shape What Counts as Racial Progress?
Legal scholar Atinuke O. Adediran argues that corporations are not just responders to anti-discrimination law but active category-makers. Through reports, targets, philanthropy, and disclosures, firms decide which racial categories become visible, which harms become recognizable, and which remedies seem legitimate. The arc runs from the largely symbolic Plans for Progress era of the 1960s, through the numerical targets and philanthropic pledges that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, to the post-2024 retreat in which race-explicit language is being recoded as risk, culture, and belonging — or erased entirely. The future of difference, Adediran writes, will be shaped not only in courts and legislatures, but in corporate reports, investor presentations, and boardrooms.
Essential points in this essay:
Corporations are not merely subjects of anti-discrimination law; they help produce the public meaning of racial categories through the ordinary tools of corporate governance — reports, policies, targets, disclosures, philanthropy, and silence
The post-Floyd era introduced numerical “racial targets” and supplier-diversity pledges that defined the terrain of accountability, but rarely asked why those numbers represented racial progress in the first place
Since 2024, race-explicit language has been recoded into managerial categories — inclusion, belonging, culture, risk — or erased outright, removing a major accountability mechanism for employees, consumers, and shareholders
About the author: Atinuke O. Adediran is Professor of Law at Fordham University. Her work examines how corporate governance and public commitments shape decisions on contested social and environmental issues, and how those decisions ripple through firms, markets, and the communities they affect. She is the author of Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
Major institutions help transform social categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation. But the corporate sector is rarely understood as one of those institutions.
Beyond the Law: Corporations as Category-Makers
When people think about how social categories are transformed, they often look first to law. In the United States and elsewhere, legislatures, courts, and government agencies define what institutions are permitted to do, what they are prohibited from doing, and what systems they must put in place to avoid discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, and other protected categories. In the European Union, people might think of EU directives and national laws as shaping how institutions understand and respond to difference. On this view, institutions such as universities and corporations mainly respond to law and state regulations. They implement legal requirements, adjust internal policies, and conform their conduct to government mandates.
But corporations do not merely respond to legal categories. They also help produce and reshape the public meaning of those categories through the language they use. Corporations help determine which categories become visible, which harms become recognizable, which remedies seem possible, and which forms of accountability become legitimate. They do this through ordinary tools of corporate governance: reports, policies, targets, risk disclosures, websites, internal memos, philanthropic pledges, investor-facing statements, earnings calls, social media, and silence.
“Corporations help determine which categories become visible, which harms become recognizable, which remedies seem possible, and which forms of accountability become legitimate.”
In my new book, Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress (Cambridge University Press, 2026), I show how multinational corporations helped shape the meaning of racial progress after the murder of George Floyd and the protests and reactions that followed in 2020. The book’s core claim is that corporate words are governance tools. They define what firms are willing to recognize, what they are willing to measure, what they are willing to fund, and what they are willing to withdraw when legal and political conditions change.
From Plans for Progress to Post-Floyd Targets
Corporate public commitments on race did not begin in 2020. During the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, the largest corporations joined the “Plans for Progress” program, making public commitments to recruit, hire, and promote Black people. Those commitments functioned primarily as signals that corporations stood with the federal government’s civil rights agenda. Despite being in collaboration with the federal government, those commitments lacked strong accountability mechanisms and were largely unsuccessful for addressing racial inequality in the private sector.
After George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, the scale and register of corporate speech shifted dramatically. Companies issued statements, updated websites, published reports, and announced commitments to do better. Corporations that had long spoken in generalized terms about diversity and inclusion began to name racism and racial injustice more directly, acknowledging that race was not only a matter for government, courts, or civil society, but also for firms, workplaces, and markets. But unlike the Plans for Progress era, these statements did more than signal commitment to addressing racial discrimination. They also helped define the very terms and limits of racial progress itself.
One way corporations defined those limits was through numerical targets. Corporations pledged to hire, promote, and expand opportunities for people of color within their firms. Many made specific commitments using numbers, such as 20 percent, for the share of people of color they intended to hire or include in leadership pipelines. These “racial targets” were goals or aspirations, but they were rarely grounded in historical context. Companies often did not explain why those numbers made sense for that company, at that time, for that particular workforce, or for the particular racial groups named or implied.
What those targets did do was define the terrain. For companies that adopted racial targets, employees, customers, shareholders, journalists, and advocacy groups could search for evidence that companies were moving toward the numbers they had announced. But the public conversation rarely asked why those numbers represented an appropriate measure of racial progress in the first place. If a company met its goal, did that mean it had reached the outer limit of racial progress? If a firm increased representation by a certain percentage, did that mean it had addressed the structures that produced exclusion, hierarchy, or racial subordination within the firm?
Philanthropy as Category-Definition
Philanthropy followed a similar pattern. Many corporations announced commitments to fund minority-owned businesses, minority-serving nonprofits, historically marginalized communities, and organizations focused on racial justice. At first glance, these commitments appeared to expand the field of corporate responsibility, but they also helped define the parameters of racial progress. Much of this philanthropy was transactional and tailored to business needs. It appeared through supplier diversity programs and loans or investments framed as support for communities of color. In many cases, corporations transformed philanthropy into forms compatible with corporate growth, market expansion, reputational benefit, and business strategy.
The Retreat: From Race to Risk
Then, as political conditions began to shift in the United States starting in 2024, many corporations began recasting the language of race in more managerial and mundane terms. Words such as racism, racial justice, racial equity, and institutional racism gave way to inclusion, belonging, culture, respect, opportunity, and risk, language that detaches inequality from racial history and makes corporate commitments appear less vulnerable to legal or political attack. Under the Trump administration, this shift accelerated into outright erasure. Race-explicit language has been withdrawn from internal memos, corporate websites, sustainability and corporate responsibility disclosures, mandatory Securities and Exchange Commission filings, earnings calls, social media posts, and public reports, which are the very places where corporate stakeholders, shareholders, and the broader public had become accustomed to seeing race named.
This shift has real consequences. When race is named explicitly, employees, consumers, shareholders, and the communities in which companies operate can ask whether a company is addressing racial inequality. When race becomes culture or belonging, the object of concern becomes less clear. When racial equity becomes risk, the firm’s central question shifts from what equity requires to what exposure the company faces. And when race is erased entirely, stakeholders and shareholders lose a major accountability mechanism.
“When racial equity becomes risk, the firm’s central question shifts from what equity requires to what exposure the company faces.”
In short, whether corporations defined racial progress through commitments and targets or have since recast race through the language of risk and belonging, they have become powerful actors in shaping what counts as legitimate race-conscious action. They help determine what the public is encouraged to see as racial progress, what counts as a sufficient corporate response, and when race should recede from view.
The future of difference will not only be shaped by courts, legislatures, regulators, universities, or social movements. It will also be shaped in corporate reports, compliance offices, investor presentations, human resources departments, risk committees, and boardrooms.
Atinuke O. Adediran is Professor of Law at Fordham University. Her work examines how corporate policies, governance practices, and public commitments shape decision making on contested social and environmental issues, generating reputational, financial, and legal consequences for firms, and influencing broader social outcomes. She is the author of Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Her work has won many awards, including from the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Ford Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. She holds Ph.D. and MA degrees in Sociology from Northwestern University and received a JD degree from Columbia Law School.
Futures of Difference is produced by Steven Vertovec at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science (formerly the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity).