24 May 2023 Conservative Shareholders Demand BlackRock Account for Impacts of Racist Policies

Calls for CEO Fink to Live Equitably

Washington, D.C. – Today, Scott Shepard – director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) – presents a proposal at the BlackRock annual shareholder meeting that, if approved, requires the company’s board of directors to commission an audit analyzing the impacts of the company’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies on civil rights, non-discrimination and returns to merit, and the impacts of those issues on the company’s business.

Racial equity, while at first blush a reasonable notion, is in fact itself a racist, discriminatory pursuit. Under the guise of equity and specifically DEI, corporations have allocated significant resources and attention towards implementing social justice into workplace practices and hiring. BlackRock has adopted DEI programs and trainings and assigned officers to seek to establish racial and social “equity.” But in practice, what equity really means is the distribution of pay and authority on the basis of race, sex, orientation and ethnicity rather than by merit.

Scott Shepard

“According to its progenitors, equity means active discrimination on the bases of race, sex, orientation and other suspect classifications now to make up for other discrimination by other people against other people in the past, without regard to constitutional norms of objective and equal treatment, until equalities of outcome by race- and sex-based categories are achieved,” said Shepard in prepared remarks.

“This standard interpretation of equity makes its chief methods not only illegal, but unconstitutional,” added Shepard.

“Of course, Mr. Fink, you can legally support equity by giving away your and your family’s assets and power to those whom equity honors as ‘diverse,’ to improve equity-based outcomes,” suggested Shepard. “You could constrain your descendants’ futures to further that goal. But until you get down to equitable averages yourself, you have no business demanding that others who look and love like you submit to the discriminatory indignities of equity.”

In developing the requested audit and report, BlackRock should consult civil rights and public interest law groups, but it must not compound error with bias by relying only on left-leaning organizations. It must consult groups across the spectrum of viewpoints, including right- leaning civil-rights groups representing people of color – such as the Woodson Center or Project 21 – and groups that defend the rights and liberties of all Americans.

BlackRock’s annual shareholder meeting will be held virtually on Wednesday, May 24 at 8:00 AM EDT. The meeting can be accessed by clicking here.

View FEP’s Proposal 5 on page 99 of BlackRock’s proxy statement.

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