The Biden administration’s relentless DEI push continues apace

Presidents used to appoint diplomats to defend the interests of the United States and the public against foreign adversaries. That looks now like a gauzy past. Today, you have President Joe Biden’s appointees, who want to demolish the society they purport to represent.

Sadly, this is no exaggeration. On April 2, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appointed Zakiya Carr Johnson as the State Department’s new Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer to “advance our deep commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the Department.” 

The fact that the Biden administration stubbornly clings to DEI — the way Obama said Americans clung to their guns and Bibles — is puzzling. The private sector seems to be running away from DEI with as much speed as it initially rushed into the embrace of these dubious trainings and practices.

The adoption of DEI peaked in the tumultuous summer of 2020, when U.S. cities were rocked by hundreds of riots led by Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by Marxists intent on upending American society. The violence intimidated the gatekeepers of our cultural institutions into accepting deep cultural transformation, and thus, the surge of DEI.

The reason often given by companies for now stiff-arming DEI is that it has proved to be divisive. It turns out that forcing the public into “anti-racism” trainings that reminded many of the struggle sessions of the Cultural Revolution in China was not popular.

There is also the fact that evidence is piling up that DEI does not work — i.e., it does not translate into higher profits or other better outcomes.

Yet, undeterred by popular antagonism, the Biden administration marches on to the DEI beat. 

Which brings us back to Carr Johnson’s appointment. Who is she exactly? The public has a right to sift through what she thinks and says.

Johnson has bounced between DEI jobs at the State Department, where she was director of the “Race, Ethnicity, and Social Inclusion Unit” for six years. She’s also worked in the U.S. Congress and lefty NGOs, including the very lefty “Geledes instituto da mulher Negra” in Brazil for six years. Even prior to that employment, Johnson was a defender of Brazil’s Marxist president, Inacio Lula Da Silva.

Her views of the United States, the country she now represents, come straight out of the critical race theory (CRT) playbook: the U.S. is systemically rotten, and thus requires systemic overhaul.

“Because we live and work within systems, and those systems, as I mentioned before, are so deeply rooted in patriarchy, in colonialism, in racism, in otherism, we tend to be very resistant to shifts and changes,” she said in a 10-minute video on intersectional feminism she made in 2020 for a consulting firm she founded. “In order to make any change, we’ve literally got to be about dismantling that traditional structure at every juncture.”

Johnson’s talk was replete with the CRT terms that have forged the new woke dialect that is learned in today’s universities, and then carried forth into the workplace. Words such as “representation,” “intersectionality,” “patriarchy,” “interrogate,” etc. As with all CRT experts, everything often boils down to “power dynamics,” a term Johnson uses over and over.

Society is “laden with traditions that already carry power dynamics, be they from histories of colonialism, or patriarchy, or misogyny. There are hierarchies and values, and those values really make it difficult to navigate and think about a future that is different than the way things have always been,” she claimed.

How do you change so much “iniquity” saturating American society, and the West in general? “Analyzing those power dynamics on a day-to-day basis is how we move ahead,” she said in the video.

In a paper she co-authored for Germany’s Heinrich Boll Foundation in 2020 with five other women who had formed the intersectionality group Action Circle, Johnson further elucidates what ails us. “Everything is interconnected, whether we are combatting racism, confronting patriarchy, or dismantling white supremacy,” she wrote.

As one of the founders of Action Circle, she wrote that she would “challenge this group not to fall victim to a Eurocentric mindset. I do not believe that the way we construct solutions to the most pressing issues we are facing in this world should model a colonizer’s map of how to do things.”

Biden has now appointed this ideologue as witch-hunt supremo at the State Department to no doubt ferret out malcontents who have lived abroad and whose experiences don’t quite square with the notion that we live under “systems of oppression.”

We once confronted enemies. Now the enemy is us.

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Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.