Explained | Why Google Calendar removed Black History, Pride Months, other events

Google Calendar has removed Pride and Black History months, and other cultural events -- with the Verge reporting on it last week after several users called out the company online for the exclusionary move.

Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage are also among the events that have been removed, the publication reported.

One user said it was 'shameful', while another said the platform was being used to 'capitulate to fascism.'

Google confirmed the changes made to default Calendar events, but explained it saying, "For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world. We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments," in a statement conveyed by spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld.

However, it is interesting to note that the change comes after Donald Trump 2.0 with the current president of America crusading against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives -- going so far as to blame the Washington plane and chopper crash on DEI hiring.

Google, in the Trump era has has also announced it will be rolling back its DEI initiatives in employement policies after Trump ordered the same for federal agencies. It has also begun showing the Gulf of Mexico as 'Gulf of America' to US users. The tech behemoth will also be calling the Denali mountain in Alaska as 'Mount McKinley' after Trump signed orders for the same in his first day in the Oval Office.

Speaking to The Guardian Google said it "continues to actively celebrate and promote cultural moments as a company in our products," with YouTube Music notably still offering a Black History Month playlist.