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In the Trump Era, Celebrating Black History Month Feels Radical Again

After putting on their very best performances of solidarity every Black History Month, this year corporate marketers have seemed at a loss for words.

Black History Month arrived this February, just as it does every year — except a lot quieter. 

Streaming services featured fewer ads with voiceovers celebrating “Black excellence” and “Black girl magic.” Brand social media accounts — once quick to flood timelines with MLK and Maya Angelou pull quotes — were noticeably hushed. After years of putting on their very best performances of solidarity every Black History Month, corporate marketers have seemed at a loss for words this year. Ironically, that silence says far more about capitalism, cowardice, and complicity than any of their performative displays ever did. 

Those displays peaked in the aftermath of George Floyd’s May 2020 murder, as corporations fell over themselves in a collective rush to perform grief and solidarity? During Black History Month 2021, Nike observed the month by reworking the color schemes of some of its more popular sneakers for limited-edition styles and announced plans to distribute half a million dollars to nonprofits serving predominantly Black communities. Target launched an HBCU student-design challenge, offered a special collection by Black designers, and touted its new commitment to increase the number of Black workers by 20 percent — all of which followed the launch of its Racial Equity Action and Change, or REACH, initiative, which committed to spending more than $2 billion with Black businesses. And roughly 100 globally-recognized brands “mentioned Black History Month or used the hashtag #BlackHistoryMonth 122 times on the social media site formerly known as Twitter,” according to Adweek. 

By February 2025, just two of those same brands — Spotify and Ralph Lauren — mentioned Black History Month even once on the platform. 

The silence was neither coincidence nor accident. The years since 2020 have borne witness to one of the most vicious white backlashes to Black demands for liberation since Reconstruction. In short order, the right launched a cynical misinformation campaign around “critical race theory,” the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down affirmative action, and the idea of racial equity as anti-white “reverse-racism” gained renewed traction. Books by Black and LGBTQ authors were being banned and burned. Bans on the teaching of Black history were codified in at least 18 states. And Donald Trump was reelected — itself a testament to festering white racial resentment — ushering in a wave of anti-DEI policies. 

Trump turbocharged efforts to erase Black history. In March 2025, he signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which took direct aim at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, an institution he would later complain is too focused on “how bad slavery was.” The Naval Academy library purged 400 books it claimed promoted DEI, including Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — although it retained two copies of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In Mississippi, at the National Monument Home of Medgar........

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