The State Department, joining corporations and college campuses across the country, is appointing a “Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer,” which follows the Biden administration’s efforts to undo Trump-era move to rid the federal bureaucracy of diversity training informed by critical race theory.
“The CDIO will align and advance [diversity and inclusion] policies across the department, bring transparency to these initiatives, and hold senior leadership accountable on progress,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement this afternoon. “Our goal is to incorporate diversity and inclusion into the Department’s work at every level.”
Having a diplomatic corps that, as Blinken often puts it, “truly reflects America” is a worthy bipartisan goal, and the department has long had trouble recruiting minority and female foreign-service officers.
But Blinken seems to be offering a dubiously reasoned project to show off the administration’s progressive bona fides. The appointment of an executive officer to implement diversity and inclusion training through the ranks of the department emulates the extensive efforts of college administrators and executives to do the same in their own organizations. Before even broaching a philosophical objection to these programs — and there are many ripe for pointing out, as they’ve spawned a field characterized by its divisive grifters peddling questionable theories — it’s worth pointing out that they don’t even really work.
Which is why a seasoned foreign-affairs correspondent challenged State Department spokesperson Ned Price on the administration’s sincerity during the daily press briefing yesterday:
In fact, report after report comes out every year saying [the State Department is] less diverse, it’s not representative. And now we have a situation where the President of the United States actually happened to have been the number two of the country, the entire country, for eight years, and the Secretary of State happened to have been the deputy secretary of state for four years. Why didn’t they do something then about this? Why is it – it’s not as if they weren’t in positions of leadership before, prior to four years ago. Why now? Why all of a sudden now? This has been a problem that’s gone back decades. Why didn’t they do something about it then?
Why indeed. The Biden administration seems to hope that in rejecting Trump-era mandates targeting critical race theory and subsequently reshaping the State Department in the image of diversity and inclusion-obsessed college administrations, it can score a few political points.
Like much else of what the administration is doing in service of its “America is Back” narrative, hiring a CDIO is a vague gesture toward the fashionable progressive-bureaucratic orthodoxy of the day.