The racist hiring policies at Williams-Sonoma, beginning with
its board of directors and continuing all the way down

On September 3, 2024 the non-profit first amendment legal firm America First Legal (AFL) filed a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the Williams-Sonoma corporation for its extensive DEI racial hiring policies that specifically favor some skin colors over others.

Williams-Sonoma, a kitchenware and home furnishings retailer with brands including Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Pottery Barn Teen, West Elm, Williams Sonoma Home, Rejuvenation, Mark and Graham, and GreenRow, proudly represents to the public and its shareholders and investors that race, sex, and national origin are motivating factors in its hiring, employment, and contracting practices.

As outlined in Williams-Sonoma’s 2024 Annual Report, their Equity Action Plan and Equity Action Committee led to “approximately 68.1% of our total workforce identified as female and approximately 41.1% identified as an ethnic minority group.” The company boasts higher management, comprising “56.6% of Vice Presidents and above identified as female.”

Williams-Sonoma’s Equity Action Committee also appears to reward executives for making race, color, sex, or national origin a motivating factor in hiring and other employee practices. The Equity Action Plan tracked and set goals for the diversity of the company, board members, and board nominees. It then designed the “Associate Equity Network Groups” that benefit some workers and disfavor others, specifically white, male, and religious Americans.

In other words, this company demands race and sex be considered as a qualification for a job, regardless of the person’s skills, experience, or talent, and it also demands that whites and men be put on the back of the bus, considered last in all hiring decisions, merely because they are either white or male.

As AFL’s letter [pdf] to the company’s board of directors notes bluntly:

Williams-Sonoma Inc. has affirmatively represented to its shareholders, investors, and the SEC that race, sex, and national origin are motivating factors in its employment and contracting practices. Management has, therefore, admitted to systemically violating federal civil rights laws.

AFL in this letter as well as its complaint to the EEOC [pdf] demands the company immediately cease these discriminatory and illegal DEI policies or face a lawsuit.

AFL, as well as many other non-profit legal firms, could file almost identical letters and complaints for almost every major American corporation, most of which brainlessly adopted extensive DEI programs after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and even now proudly continue these racist programs. In every case these policies discriminate against some people merely because they happen to have the wrong skin color or are the wrong sex. And in every single case these DEI programs violate of every civil rights law passed in the last half century, and in fact were blatently illegal and immoral from the start.

It is still the law, even if some corporate lawyers
are too incompetent to recognize it.

Only now are some companies awaking to this very plain fact, quickly eliminating their DEI programs. Last week I reported on some (Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels). Subsequently several more followed (Lowes and Ford).

Many other corporations — like Williams-Somona — continue to stand firm for DEI bigotry, and thus need to be boycotted as well as have lawsuits filed against them. I have also noted how these policies are likely impacting the proper maintenance of airplanes at United and American, as well as the construction of those planes (and spacecraft) at Boeing. And these companies are only a small sampling of the new wave of bigotry that took hold of corporate America in the past decade.

Every single one of these companies needs to get smacked, and smacked hard. AFL’s actions against Williams-Somona show us one way to do it.