Sharon Chuter, founder and CEO of UOMA Beauty, believes that if brands actually want to drive change, they must turn their solidarity into action within their own companies. “The trigger for me was seeing all these brands post for George Floyd and blacking out their Instagram on Tuesday,” explains Chuter. “And I just thought, why are you absolving yourselves of the role you’ve played in creating this problem? How are you not seeing the connection between your depriving people of color of economic opportunities and the oppression?”

... [O]nly 8% of people employed in white collar professions are black, and only 3.2% of those folks are in executive or senior management level roles, despite the fact that black adults account for 13% of the U.S. population and college-educated black adults make up 10% of the population... [Chuter] launched “Pull Up or Shut Up,” a campaign that, with the help of consumers’ demands, asks brands to release the total number of black employees at their companies and to identify the levels at which those employees sit... “Every two days, we’ll choose a set of eight brands, and we will give them each 72 hours to pull up. If they don’t pull up by then, we will call them out on it.”... The first collection of brands were, as Chuter told the campaign’s following, those “that profit the most from both Black culture and Black people.” These included Nike, Adidas, Supreme, M.A.C. Cosmetics, Fenty Beauty, and Kylie Cosmetics: all brands who “market Black and target Black consumers.”... As of Monday, Kylie Cosmetics was the only member of this list to “pull up,” though other, un-named companies, like Sephora, Unilever, P&G Beauty, and Revlon, posted their employee breakdowns during that time.