Nearly 50,000 people have signed up for megachurch Pastor Jamal Bryant’s 40-day boycott of retail giant Target, set to start at the beginning of Lent on March 5 in response to the company’s recent decision to scale back its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Bryant, who leads the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, told his congregation on Sunday that he was looking for 100,000 “conscientious Christians” to join him on a 40-day fast that would include not shopping at Target, and some 47,000 people had already signed up.
“I announced last Sunday that we were calling a fast for 100,000 conscientious Christians to walk in this journey with us away from Target because they have walked away from our community and walked away from our people,” Bryant said.
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“I wanted 100,000. In one week, 47,000 people have registered to be on the fast with us,” he added in celebration as he encouraged his parishioners to sign up for the fast at targetfast.org.
Bryant also highlighted designer and founder of the lifestyle apparel brand Black Men Smile, Carlton Mackey, who he said decided to pull all his products from Target stores after learning about the fast.
The Black Men Smile brand focuses on spreading positive images of black men and amplifying black joy. Just last year, Mackey’s company announced that they were selected as a brand partner for Target’s 2024 Black History Month Collection, according to a release from the company in which Mackey celebrated Target as “a brand that’s known for supporting communities.”
After Target announced its decision to scale back its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, Mackey told WSB-TV 2 that he would no longer do business with Target.
“I don’t think I want to be in a ‘friends with benefits’ relationship with Target,” Mackey said. “I feel gaslit. I cannot use my money to show and say that I approve of what they’re doing.”
A week earlier, Bryant called out Target for what he said was the abandoning of the company’s commitment to help advance racial equity. This includes a commitment by the company to spend more than $2 billion at black-owned businesses by 2025.
The Georgia pastor accused Target of capitulating, along with other large corporations such as Walmart, to the White House’s push to end DEI policies that “undermine our national unity,” among other things. Several large American companies have re-examined their DEI policies in recent years following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 2023 that policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University that use race as a factor in enrollment decisions are unconstitutional.
Bryant and his growing list of signatories are calling on Target to restore its DEI policies, honor its $2 billion dollar pledge to the black business community, deposit $250 million “amongst any of our 23 black banks” and “pipeline” community centers at 10 Historically Black Colleges and Universities “to teach retail business at every level.”
The Target boycott is expected to last through April 17.
Organizers of the boycott plan to assess its impact and seek a meeting with Target’s board before deciding on further action ahead of the company’s shareholder’s meeting on June 12 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“What you have seen in the last three weeks with almost 300 executives orders and all of strides that our ancestors tried to make for the advancement of this country and you ain’t going to say nothing? You are prepared to spend all of your money on ‘Cowboy Carter’ tickets when the average black family doesn’t have $500 in the bank. You ain’t upset about nothing,” Bryant told his parishioners.
“White supremacy is banking on your complacency. They are banking on you being so complacent about your car, your bag, your shoes, that you don’t see the whole community is imploding around you,” he added.
“That’s why Target, Walmart, McDonald’s, Ford, Lowe’s is about to have a wakeup call because whenever it is that black people organize and mobilize there is nothing that we go after that we don’t succeed in,” he said. “I’m telling you, the only weapon they got against us is division. As long as we fight each other and do not walk together we are always going to be defeated.”
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