Twenty-five years back, I went to India as a freshly minted Foreign Service agent. I trained in Hindi for three weeks, and I was interviewing up to 200 card candidates each day. After that, I served in Africa, Europe, and Asia, going from young officer to running a blog.
I was honored to serve my country as a minister because I adore it. America certainly has its flaws, and its history has some vile chapters, but I’ve personally witnessed how strongly we stack up against any other nation and system of government on Earth. Nothing in the United States has a person with greater chance of succeeding, regardless of their background.
That is why I fear the State Department’s increasing move toward ideology and politics. The United States requires political neutral, competent employees who are willing to carry out elected representatives ‘ policies. But the State Department’s new escape from significance to “equity” affects concepts that took 200 years to establish.
Race fundamentalists like Ibram X. Kendi think that any gap in the diversity of culture representation in any business is evidence of bias. They disregard the apparent factors that can explain group differences, such as personal effort, family dynamics, support, and other characteristics of successful cultures from all over the world.
However, their vision of “equity” has captured American training and authorities, including the State Department. In 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken established an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, led by a new chief diversity and inclusion officer ( CDIO ), and devised an” Equity Action Plan” to redirect U. S. diplomacy.
Since then, the CDIO has persistently pursued preferred choosing to make sure that the Foreign Service “looks like America.” But in reality, nothing in America “looks like America“. Sports, business, pleasure, treatments, the military — in no realm of our national life did you get sex and race percent completely in line with the community as a whole. In a completely society, persons choose, contend, and form normally.
Another type of imaginable world has the idea that everything will end up being the same. But every case of that, from Cuba to North Korea, shows the same style: People are poorer, less free, and also ruled by a wealthy wealthy. At least in a bourgeois, free community, that elite is typically created by specific talent, difficult work, and great decisions.
Like Kendi, State Department opponents of “equity” declare there are” systemic” obstacles to the choosing and development of certain organizations. However, recent data indicates that black officers are promoted more frequently than white or Asian officials, and that people are promoted more frequently than men. Yet, the State Department continues to proceed as if such obstacles existed. The State Department-USAID Joint Regional Strategy claims that” widespread injustice is a’ national security threat,'” without any information.
The State Department’s says that some so-called immigrants are a hostile environment for some past Foreign Service officials are also unsupported by facts. Next time, there were only two studies of discrimination among around 25, 000 U. S. workers in the legal and foreign services — that’s one case per every 12, 500 employees. Yet the department’s Bureau of Global Talent Management ( HR ) spends nearly$ 80 million a year on an endless array of equity-obsessed training programs, with no evidence that they improve the workforce, much less American diplomacy.
In just the last several months, for example, GTM offered staff a half day of work time to take a course on” Intersectional Gender Analysis Training”, which “explores how gender and systems of power shape an individual’s lived experience”, paid one consultant what was likely a very large fee to lecture staff on the dubious concept of “implicit” bias, and sponsored another course on “equity in journalism” — by a supposed expert whose background, she says, is” not in journalism” but” community building and education and organizing”. Additionally, the State Department supported a staff-run occasion that was “only for women of color.”
In 2022, the department deemphasized the objective Foreign Service Officer Test ( FSOT ) to make hiring “more equitable“. In order to ascertain who moves forward in the selecting process, a Qualification Evaluations Panel then combines the exam score with articles and other personal assessments. This mirrors the approach of institutions, laws, and medical institutions, which use vague “holistic” assessments of candidates to acknowledge them despite low test scores. This may ensure “equitable” outcomes, but it also generates a weaker intake of officers, which will reduce the effectiveness of American diplomacy.
All societies need elites. Whether for pilots, brain surgeons, or special forces, at some point an objective standard must be met if we are to maintain excellence. The State Department can make personnel decisions that are obedient to immutable characteristics by returning the FSOT as a requirement. Every foreign service official I’ve ever met supports efforts to hire people from all over the country, regardless of the “type” of American they employ to do so.
It is in the national interest to repair our educational system and strengthen families to increase opportunities for all. However, making hiring, promotion, or who gets what assignment based on race and sex rather than merit and experience is a mistake.
Like many other Foreign Service officers, I’ve traveled to and lived in societies plagued by racial or tribal conflicts for power and wealth. That zero-sum game never works out well, and it should n’t be the one we use to emulate it. Instead, we should celebrate the American values of equal opportunity, competition, and merit, which made our country and its institutions the envy of the planet.
The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center is home to Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow.
