President-Elect Biden’s “Unrelenting” Commitment to Diversity

What’s accomplished by having an administration that looks like America?

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

President-elect Joe Biden told the American people, “My administration’s going to look like America, not just my staff, the administration from the vice president straight down through cabinet members to major players within the White House and the courts.”

That sounds good, but what’s accomplished by having an administration that looks like America?

The President-elect’s statement reinforced a previous pledge — to have an unrelenting commitment to diversity. Diversity is multifaceted, but Biden was referring to Title VII diversity. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. (Today the diversity doctrine includes other groups.) However, prohibiting discrimination was the easy part. Integrating, or including the formerly excluded, without government fiat was the difficulty.

Diversity became the doctrine for voluntary inclusion.

For the last three decades of the 20th century experts have described to American institutions the benefits of diversity and American institutions have been diversifying rapidly. By the 21st century American…