The Department of Woke

By Jimmy Quinn

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken named the State Department’s first-ever special representative for racial equity and justice. He created the new post pursuant to the White House’s over-arching push to radically reshape the federal bureaucracy to more fully promote equity-centered principles, as distinct from efforts to achieve mere equality. 

 

If the wording of his press release announcing the move sounded rather vague, Blinken’s personnel choice clarified the direction in which State’s equity agenda is trending. While offering platitudes about confronting “systemic racism, discrimination, and xenophobia around the world,” he said that he selected Desirée Cormier Smith, a former Foreign Service officer who returned to the department during the Biden administration. Cormier Smith, he wrote, “is a recognized racial justice expert with a deep and steadfast commitment to equity and justice for all.”

 

Her credentials as such are made clear in a few online posts she wrote in late 2020 during a stint at the Open Societies Foundation, her most recent employer before rejoining the State Department as an adviser to its international-organizations bureau. “We can begin to repair our nations through reparation and healing,” she said in a tweet endorsing a global campaign for reparations for structural racism. At another point, she responded to a tweet that warned about a “leftist” effort to abolish the Electoral College even if Joe Biden were to win the presidency: “HECK YES.” She’d previously written that “racism and slavery” are at that institution’s roots.

 

Although it’s tempting to dismiss these messages as the insignificant online postings of an appointee chosen to placate the White House’s constituency of professional activists, it would be a mistake to do so. According to a State Department email I reported on for NRO in June, the job, whose holder is not subject to Senate confirmation, has, at least on paper, a wide mandate, empowering Cormier Smith to shape everything from multilateral diplomatic interactions to internal State Department DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) workforce initiatives to the department’s work on “disinformation” touching marginalized communities — a responsibility that was left undefined. 

 

In practice, the extent of Cormier Smith’s mandate remains fuzzy. But she’s serving in a highly visible post that Blinken’s office has clearly chosen to elevate, in keeping with the White House’s work on equity. 

 

Her appointment fits a broader pattern of culturally progressive actions at the department for well over a year now. They reflect State’s adoption of concepts and initiatives that are championed by the progressive activist set and congruent with its understanding of identity and of America’s role in the world. 

 

On his first day in office, President Biden signed two executive orders that have reverberated across the federal government. Arguably, none of the other orders he signed that day — there were 17 in all — was as consequential and far-reaching for so many different agencies. 

 

The first of the two, and the first of Biden’s presidency, is Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government.” It was widely understood to roll back a Trump-era directive barring the instruction of “divisive concepts” promoting “race and sex stereotyping”— an executive order that had the effect of ending diversity trainings at government agenices across the federal bureaucracy. Diversity trainings began again almost immediately. 

 

A Government Accountability Office report released this month audited State’s and USAID’s work on implementing the order’s mandate. Per the GAO report, State defines its commitment to “race equity” as a duty to promote

 

the condition where one’s race identity has no influence on how one fares in society. Race equity is one part of racial justice and must be addressed at the root causes and not just the manifestations. This includes the elimination of policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race. 

 

This is a significant, new understanding of State’s role. “While equity is not an entirely new concept for either” State or USAID, “distinguishing it from equality is,” according to the GAO document. “State officials also said advancing equity is something that the entire agency, and not just a few offices, must undertake.”

 

The second of the executive orders, “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” aims to extend existing protections against gender discrimination. Effectively, it enshrines the role of progressive gender ideology — and therefore the idea that gender is a flexible concept — as part of the administration’s efforts on other, less controversial initiatives, such as advocating the decriminalization of same-sex relationships around the world.  

 

Taken together, these Day One orders set the table for a dramatic overhaul of the State Department’s internal workings and public-facing diplomatic work. In effect, State seeks to build out a DEI-focused infrastructure that runs parallel to its existing mandates. 

 

What followed the early-term executive orders were noteworthy personnel appointments. Cormier Smith’s appointment has come relatively late. In mid April 2021, Blinken selected Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a career diplomat, as State’s first chief diversity-and-inclusion officer. That September, he named Jessica Stern, previously the director of an NGO focused on LGBTQ rights, the first “special envoy to advance the human rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Persons.” 

 

State then established internal teams to move this strategy down the line. In May 2021, Blinken issued unclassified guidance to employees announcing the establishment of an “Agency Equity Team” to implement the equity order. With a membership of more than 80, and helmed by Abercrombie-Winstanley and Deputy Secretary of State Brian P. McKeon, the team was tasked with implementing the executive order. It had a wide remit across State’s work on foreign assistance, foreign-policy strategy, public messaging, consular services, and departmental procurements. That group’s efforts culminated in the equity action plan that Blinken unveiled in April. “Inequity is a national security challenge with global consequences,” begins his statement announcing the document’s publication. 

 

Both with a public-facing zeal and to an extent that would surprise many people, Foggy Bottom has adopted the administration’s line on gender identity.

 

The most headline-grabbing example came last year when the department announced that on passport applications it would add a third gender marker for individuals who identify as neither male nor female. Blinken, in June 2021, described the move as consistent with the Biden administration’s efforts to promote “the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people” and to “re-engage with allies and partners.” These are lofty goals, and they raise some basic questions: How will State coordinate with countries that don’t recognize a third category of gender? How will State prevent confusion that might arise from this change, and how will it prevent people from taking advantage of it to conceal their identities for illicit purposes?

 

A few months later, in the immediate aftermath of the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, State attracted derision for a tweet celebrating “International Pronouns Day” and citing an article that noted that some transgender persons use “ze/zir/zirs” as pronouns. 

 

More significantly, there’s a policy-oriented element to State’s preoccupation with gender identity. According to internal departmental documents obtained by National Review, similar work proceeded more quietly within the department throughout 2021, as officials embraced the language of progressive activists. In May of that year, in guidance on sensitivity to transgender employees, the department urged officials to “consider a shift in language to avoid making assumptions that can be offensive to transgender and gender nonconforming employees.” Officials were encouraged to use “words like everyone, colleagues, and esteemed guests rather than ladies and gentlemen.”

 

The document included a warning to those who don’t get with the times: “Persistent misuse of any employee’s name, pronoun, and/or honorific may be considered harassment.” The Family Liaison Office, which supports diplomats’ families, was renamed the “Global Community Liaison Office” in order to “better reflect and include diverse individuals and family types.”

 

This campaign also reshaped some aspects of the department’s interactions in the field, according to a recently released interagency report describing the implementation of a presidential memo on LGBTQ rights.

 

Echoing the sort of rebranding represented by the newly anointed Global Community Liaison Office, the interagency report bragged that the U.S. led the United Nations’ first-ever resolution, in December 2021, using the phrase “sexual orientation and gender identity,” adding that it was “the first in U.N. history to include a reference to women in all of their diversity.” Around the same time, Stern “inquired” of Vietnamese officials about “a draft gender affirmation law” that would more easily allow for official gender changes. And from Bratislava to Manila, U.S. diplomats also worked to cultivate the next generation of “LGBTQI+” activists. 

 

Meanwhile, senior State officials, from Blinken on down, talked up the history of systemic racism in the United States. In May 2021, in a department-wide guidance marking the George Floyd killing, employees were told that State encouraged writers of posts “to focus on the need to eliminate systemic racism and its continued impact.” 

 

In another prominent move, in June 2021, the secretary of state invited E. Tendayi Achiume, a UCLA law professor who has written about critical race theory and was at the time a U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary racism, to investigate the United States. Over a year later, State apparently has not made preparations for an investigation by any U.N. rapporteur, raising the question whether the announcement was merely a publicity stunt.

 

But, on the whole, the equity agenda is the farthest thing from a messaging trick, given that State is shifting officials’ precious time, and department resources, to implement a program of dubious value. Already, each bureau has had to assign to at least one deputy assistant secretary the responsibility of coordinating the implementation of order 13985; bureaus may also hire officials dedicated to that responsibility. Biden’s budget request for the coming fiscal year includes $2.6 billion for gender-equity work and supporting “underserved communities.”

 

Yet that might not be enough. This new equity bureaucracy is just getting started, as it entrenches itself as a new power center within American diplomacy. The GAO report identifies several challenges, including an apparent “lack of dedicated resources”: “State officials said they would require additional staffing resources to meet the priorities in the executive order and the agency does not currently have dedicated staff to advance equity.” That’s one of the next fights. State, echoing professional activists, also plans to “embed intersectional equity principles” in its communications strategy.

 

If recent history is a guide, the equity bureaucrats — and their champions, such as Cormier Smith — stand a reasonable chance of getting the support they need.