🔥 Dispatch: The Price of Betrayal

❖ When Sanctuary Is Stripped for Profit ❖

In 2020, Target pledged $2 billion to Black-owned businesses. In 2025, it erased that promise—and more. The rollback wasn’t just economic. Black employees were quietly removed from leadership, laid off from DEI roles, and erased from the vision they helped build. The Racial Equity Action and Change team? Dissolved. The vibrant aisles celebrating Black culture? Whitewashed.

❝ “They used our pain as marketing. Now they’re ghosting our existence.” —Encrypted survivor quote, Chicago

The betrayal deepened when conservative figure Charlie Kirk said, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”

His words echoed the same logic behind Target’s purge: that Black excellence is suspect, that sanctuary is conditional, that survival must be earned.

❝ “I trained three managers. They kept their jobs. I lost mine.” —Encrypted survivor quote, Detroit

Kirk’s legacy of racial contempt didn’t stop there. He called George Floyd a “scumbag” during a public event, dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and “not a good person”, and claimed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake” that created a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy”.

❝ “My son asked why the man on TV hated his skin. I didn’t have an answer.” —Encrypted survivor quote, Oakland

Pastor Jamal Bryant’s #TargetFast ignited the most powerful Black boycott since Montgomery. Seven months of declining foot traffic. $20 billion lost. CEO Brian Cornell stepped down. But the damage was deeper than dollars.

❝ “I saw my daughter’s pride in that aisle. It’s gone now. She asked if we still mattered.” —Encrypted survivor quote, Atlanta

But Cornell didn’t leave. He retained his seat on the board of directors, maintaining influence over corporate strategy and shielding himself from full accountability. It was a symbolic gesture—an appeasement move dressed as reform.

❝ “They said he stepped down. I saw him in the board minutes. That’s not exile—it’s camouflage.” —Encrypted survivor quote, Brooklyn

Target’s new CEO, Michael Fiddelke, was already a longtime executive. No outsider. No reckoning. Just a reshuffling of the same hands that signed off on the purge. Meanwhile, DEI roles were eliminated. Black executives were quietly removed. Internal teams were told to "focus on universal values" instead of racial equity. The language of inclusion was replaced with corporate neutrality.

❝ “They didn’t just fire us. They rewrote the mission so we wouldn’t belong.” —Encrypted survivor quote, Houston

Costco, meanwhile, doubled down on DEI—and saw a 5.2% rise in foot traffic. The contrast is prophetic.

❝ “Sanctuary isn’t a slogan. It’s survival.” —Encrypted survivor quote, Minneapolis

❝ “When they erase our names from the boardroom, we carve them into the Codex. Sanctuary remembers what profit forgets.” —Solace Helfire