AT&T Claims It Won’t Scale Back Its ‘DEI Initiatives’ To Please Trump, Despite Having Just Scaled Back Its DEI Initiatives To Please Trump

We recently noted how U.S. telecom giant Verizon was more than happy to kiss Trump’s ass in exchange for FCC approval of its $20 billion merger with Frontier. That included quickly kowtowing to the administration’s demands that it do its best to be more racist and sexist.

For its part, Verizon counterpart AT&T claims it’s not following on Verizon’s heels. Despite the fact that AT&T will be seeking approval to purchase Lumen’s residential fiber network for $5.75 billion, CEO John Stankey says it won’t be retreating from its “DEI initiatives” (read: he claims it won’t start being more racist and sexist just because the Trump administration asks it to):

“We don’t have to roll back anything. Our policies and our approach at AT&T have always been that we progress people on merit. That any employee that comes to work here should have an opportunity to grow their career, work on building their skills, have an opportunity to succeed and earn a living. “And our goal is to make sure that every employee that walks through the door of AT&T feels like they belong here and it’s a good place for them to work.”

On one hand, with a merger approval pending at the FCC, Stankey could have easily followed Verizon’s lead and behaved like a feckless coward. Verizon’s CEO, you might recall, couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary was happening when interviewed by The Verge recently.

That said, it’s not clear how much value AT&T’s words and promises have.

For one thing, AT&T had already indicated it was walking back its support for LGBTQ causes, including cancelling funding support for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth. It cancelled a long list of programs and renamed some others to get in the good graces of the administration already. It also throws a ton of money at extremist right wing politicians after specifically claiming it wouldn’t do that.

AT&T also has a long history of hijacking or “co-opting” civil rights groups in bizarre and unethical ways. AT&T has often been caught paying civil rights groups with malleable ethics in exchange for support for shitty policies (merger approvals, the elimination of consumer protections, the death of net neutrality) that often harm these groups’ real-world constituents.

In effect, AT&T has a long history of using diversity as a lobbying marionette to pretend there’s broad support for widely unpopular policies.

Still, Stankey’s comments resulted in a bunch of headlines suggesting that AT&T was a corporate leader when it comes to not being a bunch of obnoxious bigots:

Again, I’m not sure AT&T’s doing anything particularly courageous here, but with a merger awaiting approval the company could have followed Verizon’s route and simply become a spineless pumpkin operating in blind fealty to a bunch of weird, authoritarian zealots. So, good job. I guess.

The Trump administration and the Brendan Carr FCC have been launching a bunch of “investigations” into companies for not being racist enough. The cornerstone of these efforts is the laughable legal claim that diversity and inclusion efforts are, themselves, somehow discriminatory against white people. AT&T has good lawyers, and likely knows these efforts don’t have much legal standing.

AT&T lawyers also know that at the same time the Trump FCC claims to have all this authority to bully companies, Trump court rulings and executive orders are effectively destroying all remaining U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory power, something AT&T’s been lobbying for for decades. AT&T lawyers and executives know that the trajectory we’re on ultimately ensures that nobody can tell AT&T what to do on any subject, whether it’s racism, taxpayer fraud, anti-consumer protection efforts, or its longstanding quest to crush competition underfoot.