Jodi-Ann Burey was only two weeks into her new role as an inclusion marketing manager for an outdoor retail company when she was accused of having a “race agenda.”

Burey, who is Black, was no stranger to workplace hypocrisy; as she sees it, the office is a petri dish where the knotty dynamics of society are concentrated. At the time of the accusation in February 2020, however, all she could do was laugh. “I was like, you knew who I was before you poached me. This is exactly what you wanted me to do,” she says over Zoom. A precursor to the racial reckoning that would follow the murder of George Floyd, the moment bore an important truth for Burey: Companies will feign interest in racial equity or gender parity but fail to deliver on those promises. “It’s so weird the ways that people will

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