President Donald Trump has taken significant action through executive orders to dismantle the diversity, equity, and inclusion complex that has taken hold in federal departments and in much of corporate America. For example, he instructed the federal government to investigate private sector DEI initiatives involving the potentially illegal use of race-conscious preferences.
Many of the companies now scrambling to avoid running afoul of anti-discrimination laws—and an administration willing to enforce them—hired prominent law firms to conduct race and diversity “audits,” a practice that ramped up in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. One of the so-called diversity experts in high demand was corporate lawyer Eric Holder, the controversial former attorney general under Barack Obama.
Starbucks hired Holder, who charges as much as $2,300 an hour for his time, to conduct a “civil rights audit” in 2018. He recommended a series of policy changes to promote “equity” at the company, which implemented many of Holder’s suggestions only to be slapped with a shareholder lawsuit alleging the new policies violated non-discrimination laws. So it comes as no surprise that Trump’s executive orders have caused “fear and confusion” among corporate leaders, according to the New York Times.
Holder, who is also rumored to be panicking as a result of Trump’s action, recently circulated a memo to his corporate clients attempting to assuage their concerns. The memo, which was exclusively and semi-legally obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, is reprinted below for your immediate enjoyment:
Memo here with excerpt
Many of you have contacted me with questions regarding President Trump’s recent executive orders and the legal implications for the DEI policies I allegedly advised your companies to implement. While stipulating that these policies were enacted solely at the discretion of a corporate executive who may or may not have been acting on the advice of outside legal counsel, I strongly urge you consider taking the following steps to reduce your risk of federal prosecution:
What is important is how Holder sees everything through racism and his being black:
For much of his life, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. carried around something peculiar. While most people keep cash, family photos, and credit cards in their wallets, Holder revealed to a reporter in 1996 that he keeps with him an old clipping of a quote from Harlem preacher Reverend Samuel D. Proctor. Holder put the clipping in his wallet in 1971, when he was studying history at Columbia University, and kept it in wallet after wallet over the ensuing decades.
What were Proctor’s words that Holder found so compelling?
“Blackness is another issue entirely apart from class in America. No matter how affluent, educated and mobile [a black person] becomes, his race defines him more particularly than anything else. Black people have a common cause that requires attending to, and this cause does not allow for the rigid class separation that is the luxury of American whites. There is a sense in which every black man is as far from liberation as the weakest one if his weakness is attributable to racial injustice.”
When asked to explain the passage, Holder replied, “It really says that … I am not the tall U.S. attorney, I am not the thin United States attorney. I am the black United States attorney. And he was saying that no matter how successful you are, there’s a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal or the black doctor with the black homeless person.”
Has anyone ever asked Holder what exactly is the “common cause” that binds the black attorney general and the black criminal? More important, what should the black attorney general do about this common cause? Should the black criminal feel empathy for the black attorney general, or more likely, do the favors only flow in one direction?
Holder’s explanation of Proctor’s quote offers some key insights into our attorney general’s worldview. First, being “more particular” than anything else, skin color limits and defines Americans — in other words, race comes first for Holder.


