Google sparks criticism for removing Black History Month, Pride, among other cultural events

Google stirred a debate after its calendar removed references to Black History Month, Women’s History Month, LGBTQ+ holidays and some other events.

The search engine earlier marked the beginning of Black History Month in February and Pride Month in June. However, the events are not visible for the 2025 calendar.

In a statement, the tech giant said that the holidays removed were not “sustainable” for their model, according to a Guardian report citing Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld.

Also read | Google falls in line with Trump’s order, changes Gulf of Mexico to ‘Gulf of America’

“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,” the statement said, the report added.

“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.”

The company stated: “Google continues to actively celebrate and promote cultural moments as a company in our products,” and the change will not affect the future Google Doodles that feature artwork on the homepage during such holidays.

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Google falls in line with Trump’s policies

This comes just weeks after US President Donald Trump assumed office. 

Recently, Google fell in line with Donald Trump’s executive order by changing the name of Gulf of Mexico to ‘Gulf of America’ on Monday (Feb 10) for those using its Maps application in the United States.

Trump has also signed an order to revert the name of the highest peak in the US, Denali, back to its former moniker Mt. McKinley, to which the company would soon comply.

Also read | ‘Gulf of America’ or ‘Gulf of Mexico’: How Google deals with controversial geography

Users criticise the move

The removal of the holidays has sparked a backlash from the users, who took to its community forum to express their anger with the change.

“Embarrassing. Another example of the fast descent into fascism. There’s no reason users should have to add these dates themselves. You could have maintained the same list as always,” a user wrote. “Wonder why it’s just now that it has become unsustainable? Y’all had time to add Gulf of America to the map though…despite it only applying to the US.”

Also read | Google Maps to rename Gulf of Mexico as ‘Gulf of America’ for US users

Another said, “This is just disappointing Google. All your Pride Month features, BHM talks, minority forums, etc were all thrown out the window. Looks like all those are for a show only.”

“It’s more than just pride month. They removed Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Hispanic Heritage,” a Google product expert said.

(With inputs from agencies)