“Our strength is the respect we have for each other.” “We are one firm, one community.” “We stand united against anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and acts of hatred in any form.”
These days, such run-of-the-mill corporate nods to diversity, equity, and inclusion might elicit an eye roll from a cynical employee. They can read like a kind of throat-clearing, a prelude to a bland memo that manages to be both verbose and grandiloquent—while saying nothing at all.
But when Citigroup’s CEO Jane Fraser and her team described her company’s values this way in a statement on Oct. 22, it was not a run-of-the-mill situation.
It had been just two weeks since the Hamas incursion into Israel—the brutal murder
