Woke Works

Grey background with a man in a business suit who has an brass coloured analog alarm clock instead of a head with text that reads: "Time to Wake Up"

Stay Woke, or Pay the Apology Tax 

Two companies. Forty-eight hours. Two apologies nobody asked for and everybody saw coming.

On August 24, 2026, the internet found Target's "Circus Clown" Halloween costume for kids and clocked what a room full of decision-makers apparently didn't: a dark, exaggerated face covering that read, instantly, as blackface. A day before that, Good Good, a golf content brand promoting a new Callaway driver, released an ad showing a man shoving a woman to the ground and warning her not to touch his equipment. Both companies apologized. Both apologies arrived after the damage, not before it. And both incidents ask the same question I put to leaders who call us after the fire's already out: who, exactly, was in the room when somebody said yes?

I've sat in those rooms. I've been the person asked, after the fact, to explain why something felt off before it ever reached a shelf or a shoot, when a five-minute conversation before launch would have cost nothing and saved everything.

Image of TARGET's Blackface Halloween Costume.

White text on a green background that reads: "A golf ad showed a man shoving a woman -- and it blew up the sport. Callaway and Good Good pulled the driver commercial after instant backlash..."

The story behind the story

Target's spokesperson called the costume "especially hurtful" to Black customers and employees and admitted, "we know we got this wrong." Fair enough. But one commenter online said it sharper than any press release could: "You really don't have anyone left in Minneapolis to say, 'Hey, that's racist'?" That's not a joke. It's a receipt. Fifteen months earlier, in February 2025, Target rolled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments under political pressure, walking away from its own Belonging at the Bullseye goals. They removed anything and everything from their shelves that had a Black person on it or was created by Black peoples like Juneteenth merchandise all while still selling St. Patrick's Day merchandise. This wasn't about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, it was blatant anti-Black racism. A boycott followed. Falling sales followed the boycott. And now a clown costume that reads like a minstrel show has followed that. This isn't a coincidence. It's what Ibram X. Kendi means when he argues that racist outcomes are the product of racist policy, not merely racist individuals doing something unusual. Target didn't go hire a room full of bigots. Target emptied a room that used to catch this.

Callaway's version of the same failure is dressed differently, but it's the same failure. Golf remains one of the whitest, most male spaces in professional sport, and the people who approved an ad depicting violence against a woman, through however many rounds of creative review, apparently never had anyone with real authority in that chain willing or empowered to say no. Callaway CEO Chip Brewer put it plainly: "That approval should never have happened." He's right. The question is why it did. Just take a look at the leadership team on the Callaway web site. (FYI: Equity Practitioner Abi Adamson shared a photo of Callaway Golf's all male and all white team that approved this ad. Here is the link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffersondarrell_golf-equipment-brand-callaway-recently-aired-activity-7500538725098192896-OcqR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABSWLUBppdLqFIZJEiLLCDpNVRTJltrwuY)

So what's actually happening here?

Neither of these is an implicit conditioning problem. Implicit conditioning shows up quietly, in a resume you almost don't call back or a joke you almost don't laugh at. This is louder than that. This is structural: each organization built an approval process where harm could pass through every gate, unremarked, because the people who would have caught it, Black staff at Target, women somewhere in Callaway's and Good Good's creative chain, weren't positioned with actual power to stop it. The Four Dimensions of Racism gives us the vocabulary: this isn't interpersonal bigotry, it's institutional design. Somebody built the room. Somebody decided who gets a seat, and more importantly, who gets a veto.

Image explaining the FOUR Dimensions of RACISM: Internalized, Interpersonal, Institutional, and Structural.

The Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked this pattern for years: trust in an organization rises and falls with perceived competence and integrity, and an apology does nothing to rebuild either when the system that produced the harm is left standing untouched behind it.

The recipe

Here's what I tell clients before the crisis, because after the crisis is a very expensive time to learn it.

Representation is a checkpoint, not a headcount. Having BIPoC or melanated employees or women somewhere in your building doesn't protect you. Having them at the actual approval gate, with real authority to kill the idea, does.

Audit your yeses, not just your complaints. Most companies review what goes wrong after launch. Few review who said yes before launch, and why nobody said no. Pull your last five approved campaigns or product lines and name, literally, who was in the room.

Build the pause into the process, not the apology. A courageous conversation held before launch costs you a meeting. The same conversation held after launch costs you a boycott and lost revenue, employees, or both.

Stop confusing speed with instinct. "It felt fine to us" isn't a strategy. It's an admission that nobody with a different lived experience was close enough to the decision to feel otherwise.

This is exactly the gap our Workplace Culture Assessment Tool is built to find, and exactly the work we do through Courageous Conversations facilitation: not a values statement framed on the wall, an actual mechanism that stops the costume, or the ad, before it's a product photo.

Image of six office workers all holding signs that read: "Wake Up!"

Let's be clear about what "woke" actually is

Nobody wakes up trying to build a blackface costume or green light an assault ad. That was never the point. The point is that both of these organizations had every opportunity to build a room that catches this, and both chose, through policy, through hiring, through who they empowered to say no, not to. Woke works. Equity, diversity, and inclusion works. Belonging works. It isn't a slogan. It's a quality control system, and the two brands trending for the wrong reasons this week are proof of what happens when you dismantle one and call it efficiency.

If your organization is one screenshot away from its own apology tour, let's talk before it happens, not after: book a discovery call.

Let's break some eggs!

—Jefferson Darrell, Founder & CEO, Breakfast Culture Inc.™

Image of a Black Man holding a cardboard sign that reads: "Stay Woke ✊🏾"

P.S. and potential trigger warning: A note on this article's title.

In 1938, Louisiana-born folk and blues musician Lead Belly recorded "Scottsboro Boys," a song about nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused and nearly lynched by a white mob, and wrongfully convicted in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. In the song's spoken introduction, he warned anyone who was Black about travelling through that part of the state to "stay woke, keep your eyes open." That's the actual origin of the word in this title, and it was never a punchline. It was a survival instruction.

That warning hasn't expired. It's just changed shape, and in some places it hasn't changed shape at all. JULIAN, the Justice for Julius Action Network, founded by Jill Collen Jefferson (no relation), published a report this past February called A Crimson Record. It documents more than 70 cases across seven Deep South states, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, that the organization classifies as modern-day lynchings since 2000, alongside more than 150 total fatal hate crimes and suspicious deaths in that same period. Mississippi alone accounts for 20 of those cases. Nearly one-third of the victims are Black transgender women. JULIAN is careful to note these are its own classifications, not judicial findings; what it actually documents is a pattern of premature suicide rulings, thin crime-scene investigation, and disputed autopsies where families were shut out. As founder Jefferson put it: "Lynching has never disappeared, it has adapted, hidden behind silence and indifference." Today, in 2026, 22+ Black bodies, that we know of, have been found hanging from trees in North America.

And now there's a digital version, too. In August, Dr. Jason Arday, Cambridge University's youngest-ever Black professor, was found dead after weeks of a coordinated online campaign built on allegations from a self-described "race realist," roughly 249 articles in three weeks. No official cause of death has been released. His family said the public cruelty he faced "was too much for any man to bear." Journalist Carole Cadwalladr called what happened to him "a digital lynching." She wasn't reaching for a metaphor. The mob just moved onto servers.

Canada doesn't track "lynchings" as a category, and I'd rather be precise than reach for a false equivalence. What Statistics Canada does track is hate crime, and its most recent full-year data, 2024, shows police-reported hate crimes targeting Black communities rose 6 per cent to 873 incidents, part of a sixth consecutive year of increases in crimes motivated by race or ethnicity. Different metric. Same direction.

Staying woke was never about manners. It's protective. It always has been. Keep your eyes open. Stay Woke! ✊🏾