The U.S. Empire's Minority Firewall
Joe Biden's War Cabinet is filled with historic "diversity" picks who support the same old genocidal policies
(Linda Thomas-Greenfield)
Last May I wrote a column in the immediate wake of George Floyd’s execution by police titled, “On police murder and minority firewalls.” You can read it here if you’d like.
In that piece I wrote “There is no shortage of people of color willing to continue to be firewalls for the oppressing establishment in the political sphere…”. I also looked ahead, pessimistically, to what I imagined would be a year filled with more cynical use of “diversity” by those in power, specifically in the Democratic party and by now President-elect Joe Biden.
“We can also believe that people of color serving as political protection for the white patriarchal establishment — in law enforcement, in politics, in the corporate world — will this year have a different and more positive outcome than it has for every year of hundreds of years before it. I do not share that hope.”
The incoming President’s picks for his presidential cabinet thus far have a great deal of superficial racial, ethnic, gender, and sexuality “diversity,” garnering uncritical praise from most corporate media outlets for Biden, the segregationist and lifelong opponent to abortion rights. This is especially evident in who Biden has nominated for his War Cabinet.
Avril Haines, for example, has been nominated to become the first woman Director of National Intelligence. How progressive.
Haines, the CIA veteran who was instrumental during the Obama/Biden administration in coming up with legal pretense for their drone murder program, and who helped protect officials from the second Bush administration who hacked into government computers to destroy evidence of their torture programs, will become the first woman to run America’s authoritarian surveillance state. In neoliberal logic, that Haines is a woman is more significant than her crimes against humanity.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield is supposedly doubly inspirational as not just a woman, but a Black woman at that. In the Obama/Biden administration Thomas-Greenfield was key to the U.S. terrorizing Somalia and Niger, and now she’s been nominated to become Ambassador to the United Nations.
Biden’s pick for perhaps the most important War Cabinet position of all – Pentagon chief, is Lloyd Austin. Picking the recently retired four-star general is a Trumpian violation of federal law and democratic norms, of course. Austin is also a war-profiteer, moving immediately from the military to the board of weapons manufacturer Raytheon, where he currently sits with a fortune in shares.
That Austin is a Black man is meant to occlude all of that, and a pliant corporate media has largely stuck to that focus. The urgent call to redress the needs of marginalized peoples has been ignored by the neoliberal establishment in recent decades, as it substitutes instead a superficial value of “Diversity,” where people of different colors, dating tastes, and reproductive organs are hand-picked to advance the same corporate interests that White men in power always have.
This patina of change has hidden from view the ways that our society has stayed just as inequitable and cruel as it ever has been. Well-meaning people all too often celebrate personality, biography, gender and race of selected tokens in insulting ways that ignores the class disparities attached to the identities for most people of those intersecting groups.
People like Haines, Thomas-Greenfield, and Austin are minority firewalls for the White, patriarchal corporate world. Their genders and race will distract from that their positions and decisions will, as they always have, service the same imperial interests that the White men in their positions have.
By focusing on their genders and races instead of their reproduction of imperial, capital-serving, illegal, and cruel policies and actions, the very crimes themselves are forgotten. This is the benefit to the corporate establishment to putting Black/Brown/Red/Yellow/Queer/Woman faces on the same oppressive systems, departments, and programs.
Diversity, in and of itself, does not threaten the system. At least not when diversity is so narrowly defined.
So long as class and ideological diversity are not seen in the halls of power, and so long as the policies and programs instituted hurt the majority of minority people across the world, racial, ethnic, sexuality, and gender “Diversity” on the small teams of power brokers does not produce any substantive positive good for the world. There is nothing empowering to BIPOC across the globe, for example, when a Black or Brown person is the one pulling the trigger or launching the bombs.
There is nothing feminist about women being in charge of torture programs. Yes, some Brown, Black, Yellow, Red faces and women and Queer folk have been able to personally climb career ladders, but they’ve only done so by doing the White, patriarchal empire’s bidding.
Good for them.
Bad for us.
Bad for the world. Diversifying the colors, genders, sexes of corporate empire’s hatchet people matters not at all. It’s just public relations, cover for the crimes to ensure that the crimes continue unabated.