Overview: Corporate accountability and Black lived experience
Civil rights attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong breaks down Target’s latest product controversy and its connection to the company's rollback of DEI commitments. She challenges mainstream media narratives around consumer boycotts, emphasizing that Black lived experience and historical knowledge must be respected as real evidence.
When images of a children’s Halloween costume sold by Target began circulating, many Black Americans saw something painfully familiar: the visual language of minstrelsy and racist caricature, imagery historically used to degrade and dehumanize Black people.
Target removed the costume, acknowledged it was offensive and said it never should have been part of its assortment. What Target has not explained is how it happened. How does a product like this make it through the internal processes of one of America’s largest retailers? Who had the authority to stop it?
Intent doesn’t matter — we need evidence
Instead, others are already explaining Target’s failure for us. In a USA Today column, Elizabeth Grace Matthew acknowledged the costume was “unambiguously racial and racist,” but argued the real problem was historical illiteracy, betting it wasn’t made with racist intent.
But intent isn’t the question. Target sold an offensive product and admits it never should have been offered. Reuters reported the company declined to identify who designed the costume or explain its approval process. As a civil rights lawyer, I want the evidence.
The direct line between DEI retreats and corporate blindspots
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. In January 2025, Target retreated from significant DEI commitments. Days later, my fellow organizers and I launched the National Target Boycott here in Minnesota, now one of the most successful Black-led consumer boycotts in recent American history. For more than 18 months, Black consumers and allies have withheld our dollars, and Target has lost over $12 billion in valuation. Its longtime CEO stepped aside, the company cut roughly 1,800 corporate positions, and it fell off Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies list after a 24-year run. Now Target is apologizing for a product many of us immediately recognized as offensive. I believe those things are connected.
When a company retreats from DEI, it signals whether racial competency remains a priority. Missing that competency at the top raises the risk that offensive products move through decision-making unchecked. If people bringing products to market don’t know enough racial history to recognize degrading imagery, that doesn’t weaken the case for racial competency. It strengthens it. Historical literacy is part of racial competency, and racial competency belongs in the C-suite.
But this reveals something larger. Powerful institutions have platforms to tell the public what happened and whose interpretation to trust. They can interrogate institutions when racial harm occurs, or turn scrutiny elsewhere. The Washington Post Editorial Board recently called economic pressure against Target “union bullying.” But withholding a dollar is not a threat; it is a choice, the same choice available to any consumer, and it has always been protected, nonviolent speech. Calling it bullying doesn’t just mislabel a boycott. It recasts the people demanding accountability as the aggressors and the corporation as the victim. In USA Today, we’re offered historical illiteracy as an explanation before Target has explained anything itself.
Different arguments can perform the same function: the corporation becomes less accountable while the people challenging it become more suspect. This is one way the status quo maintains itself, letting people disengage from the harder question of what they owe when Black people ask them to stand together.
Black lived experience is evidence
Black people are not asking America to abandon critical thinking. We are asking America to stop treating our knowledge as though it doesn’t count. Our lived experience and understanding of racial history are evidence. That’s part of the lesson of the boycott: we didn’t wait for Target, an editorial board or a corporate analyst to decide whether our concerns were legitimate. We assessed what we saw, organized and acted.
Target owes the public an explanation for how this costume made it through, and what will change. When disrespect becomes a pattern, believe the pattern. We know our history, and we know what we saw. The question is whether America will listen to Black people, or continue letting powerful institutions explain our own experiences back to us.
Nekima Levy Armstrong is a civil rights attorney, activist and co-founder of the National Target Boycott.