by BHASKAR SUNKARA
The incoming Biden administration loves to tout its diversity, instead of talking about what it will actually do in power
Joe Biden is inheriting a mess of a country. The pandemic has killed 290,000 people and threatens many more; another 853,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims last month; and stores are reporting spikes in shoplifting for food and baby formula.
If Biden has any answers for us, Americans are keen to hear it.Talk of Rahm Emanuel in Biden cabinet outrages his Chicago criticsRead more
Instead, the Biden team and its media allies have talked up one rather specific aspect of the Biden administration: diversity. Over the past few weeks, Biden has announced the White House team he wants to help lead us out of crisis. Yet instead of touting the skills of those selected or what they’ll do concretely to improve working people’s lives, we’ve been hearing about their “lived experiences”.
It started with an unlikely subject, Antony Blinken. Blinken is Biden’s nominee for secretary of state and, for what it’s worth, a white guy. A white guy who happened to support the Iraq war and played a key role lobbying his boss to do the same. A white guy who founded a “strategic advisory firm” that works with defense companies the world over. There’s not much to get excited about, right?
Not so fast. As one article put it: “Antony Blinken has two toddlers. This is good for fathers everywhere.” Well, maybe not for fathers in the Middle East – but at least we’ll finally have “a dad-rocker in the state department”. Dads of the world, unite!
Some of the other expected senior Biden positions are actually from historically oppressed groups. But these announcements seem to follow the same pattern: foreground identity to the expense of real policy.
Progressives, for example, have long argued that the Department of Homeland Security should never have been created by the George W Bush administration to begin with. But why abolish a department that makes us less safe and violates our civil liberties when you can just put a person of color in charge of it?
When the Biden team announced that Alejandro Mayorkas had been picked to do just that, they cut to the chase. Instead of explaining their plans to remedy some of the horrors of American immigration policy, the Biden team reminded us that “Mayorkas will be the first Latino and immigrant nominated to serve as DHS secretary”.
Just one minute later came the breaking news that “Avril Haines will be nominated to serve as national intelligence director, which would make her the first woman to lead the intelligence community”. Haines was deputy CIA director and one of the primary architects of Obama’s drone program. When out of public service, she found time to defend torture and work for both Palantir and Blinken’s firm. All that and Haines is “a bookstore owner/community activist”.
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