Target is in the crosshairs again.
This time, the retailer is facing backlash over a children’s Halloween costume that many customers said closely resembled racist blackface and minstrel imagery. The costume, part of Target’s own Hyde and EEK! Boutique collection, featured an exaggerated smile and was photographed on a Black child. Target removed the product and apologized, saying the costume was offensive, should never have been sold, and was especially hurtful to its Black customers, employees, and partners.
And I keep coming back to one question:
How did this get this far?
Not simply how did someone design it.
How did it move from an idea to a product? How did it get approved? How did it make it through merchandising? How did it make it through a photo shoot—with a Black child as the model? How did those photographs make it through review? And how did the product eventually land on Target’s website without someone having enough context, awareness, or authority to say, Wait. We have a problem here.
For Target, this is not happening in a vacuum.
The company spent much of the past year dealing with the fallout from its decision to scale back several of its diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments. That decision contributed to boycotts and damaged relationships with some customers, particularly within Black communities. Although the year-long boycott led by Pastor Jamal Bryant formally ended in March, criticism and consumer resistance have not simply disappeared, and Target is now facing additional boycott pressure on other issues.
Meanwhile, Target’s new CEO, Michael Fiddelke, has been quite clear that the company has trust to rebuild. When he took over in February, he told customers Target was committed to earning their trust. He has since acknowledged that last year’s controversies affected sales and that there is no easy way to win that trust back.
He’s right.
There isn’t.
And this latest incident demonstrates just how careful organizations must be when they are trying to repair a damaged relationship.
When Trust Is Low, Your Margin for Error Gets Smaller
One thing I talk about frequently in my work is the trust threshold.
When trust is high, people may give you the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong.
They may believe the mistake was an anomaly.
They may believe your apology.
They may even believe you when you say, “This isn’t who we are.”
But when trust is already low, people interpret your actions differently.
The same mistake becomes evidence.
See? This is what we were talking about.
That is the position Target finds itself in now.
For customers who believed Target’s DEI rollback represented a retreat from its commitment to Black communities and other historically marginalized groups, this costume will not simply look like an unfortunate merchandising mistake.
It may look like confirmation of their concerns.
That doesn’t mean someone at Target intentionally set out to create racist imagery. We do not have evidence of that.
But intent is not the only thing that matters when trust has already been damaged.
Impact matters.
Process matters.
And the organizational conditions that allowed the mistake to happen matter.
This Is Exactly Why Diverse Perspectives Matter
Whenever companies dismantle DEI teams or reduce the influence of people responsible for inclusion, I hear some version of:
“We don’t need a DEI department to treat people fairly.”
And technically, that’s true.
Creating an inclusive workplace should never be the sole responsibility of a DEI department.
But organizations do need the capability that good DEI work provided.
They need people who can identify cultural blind spots.
They need employees with different lived experiences involved in decisions.
They need leaders who understand historical context.
They need systems that allow someone to challenge an idea before it becomes a reputational crisis.
And, perhaps most importantly, they need enough psychological safety for someone in the room to say:
“I know everyone seems excited about this, but something about it doesn’t feel right.”
Then leadership has to actually listen.
Diverse representation alone cannot prevent every bad decision. But diversity of perspective combined with psychological safety dramatically increases the likelihood that someone will notice something others have missed.
That is why the question Target should be asking isn’t just:
Who approved this costume?
It should also be:
What happened inside our system that allowed this many opportunities to catch the problem to pass without intervention?
Trust Repair Requires More Scrutiny, Not Less
When your organization is actively trying to rebuild trust, business as usual is not enough.
Your decisions require more care.
More questions.
More listening.
More examination of unintended consequences.
Target should have treated this period as a heightened reputational-risk environment.
That doesn’t mean becoming afraid to make decisions.
It means understanding the context in which those decisions will be received.
There should have been additional checkpoints around products, marketing, imagery, campaigns, and other highly visible customer-facing decisions.
Someone should have been responsible for asking:
- Who could experience this differently than we intend?
- Is there historical or cultural context we’re missing?
- Who has not been part of this decision?
- Are employees closest to the communities represented able to review or challenge this?
- What would this look like through the eyes of a customer who already doesn’t trust us?
Those aren’t “DEI questions.”
Those are good business questions.
Because cultural blind spots become reputational risk remarkably quickly.
The Employee Side of This Matters Too
There is another group Target cannot afford to overlook: its employees.
Target’s apology specifically acknowledged that the costume was hurtful to Black team members.
That acknowledgment matters.
But now Target leadership needs to listen.
Imagine being a Black employee watching this unfold after everything that has happened over the past year.
What are you thinking?
Are you questioning whether anyone with your perspective was in the room?
Are you wondering whether someone raised a concern and was ignored?
Are you wondering what the company’s commitments actually mean now?
Perhaps most importantly:
Do you believe you could raise a concern yourself without it affecting how people see you, your career, or your relationship with leadership?
That is where psychological safety becomes very real.
Organizations often talk about psychological safety in terms of meetings, feedback, and interpersonal relationships.
But psychological safety also determines whether someone interrupts a bad organizational decision.
If employees believe challenging a senior leader, designer, merchant, or popular idea will make them “difficult,” they learn to stay quiet.
And silence can get very expensive.
So What Should Target Do Now?
Removing the costume and apologizing was necessary.
Target itself called removal an “important first step.”
The key word there is first.
Now comes the harder work.
Find the breakdown, not the scapegoat.
Target has said it is examining how the costume made it through its processes. That’s exactly what should happen.
But the goal should not simply be finding the person who approved it.
Organizations love solving systemic problems by finding an individual to blame.
That rarely prevents the next failure.
Target should map the entire decision chain—from concept through design, sourcing, approval, marketing, photography, and online merchandising—and ask where cultural risk should have been identified.
Listen to Black employees before deciding what happens next.
Not a company-wide town hall where executives do most of the talking.
Create intentional opportunities for Black team members to share what this incident represents to them, what concerns they have about the organization more broadly, and what would help rebuild trust.
And leaders need to be prepared to hear things they may not like.
Rebuild the missing guardrails.
Target doesn’t have to call them DEI initiatives.
It does need the capability.
That could mean cultural review panels, employee advisory groups, external cultural consultants, risk checkpoints, or more diverse product-development teams.
The name matters far less than the function.
Someone needs to be asking the questions that apparently weren’t asked this time.
Tell people what changed.
“We are reviewing our processes” is not enough indefinitely.
Trust grows when people can see evidence.
If Target identifies gaps in its approval process, it should explain what it changed.
Not every internal detail needs to become public. But customers and employees should eventually hear something more substantive than we’ll do better.
Show them how.
Understand that trust repair happens through patterns.
This may be the most important part.
There is no statement Target can issue this week that will restore trust.
There is no campaign.
No Black History Month activation.
No donation.
No beautifully written CEO message.
Trust comes back when people observe enough consistent behavior over enough time that they are willing to reconsider what they believe about you.
That’s the work.
You Can’t Market Your Way Out of a Trust Problem
Target’s business has recently begun showing encouraging signs. Comparable sales increased 3.8% in the most recent quarter, customer traffic increased, and the company has been investing heavily in stores, products, prices, technology, and the overall customer experience.
Those things matter.
But you cannot merchandise your way out of a trust problem.
You cannot renovate stores fast enough to fix it.
And you cannot simply wait for people to forget.
Because customers don’t experience your values through your corporate statements.
They experience them through your decisions.
Employees don’t experience your culture through your website.
They experience it through what gets rewarded, what gets questioned, whose voices matter, and what happens when someone speaks up.
Target has said it wants to earn back trust.
This moment gives the company an opportunity to demonstrate whether it truly understands what that requires.
Because rebuilding trust isn’t about never making another mistake.
It is about developing the people, processes, awareness, and culture that make the next mistake less likely—and responding differently when something does go wrong.
Trust is built through consistent action over time.
And when you’re already trying to rebuild it, every action counts.
Interested in how we can help you build and maintain trust? Reach out.
