Sr. DOD Advisor: Military Needs Minorities to Retain Competitive Edge, Achieve Critical Missions

Pushing a Department of Defense (DOD) initiative to recruit and promote minorities, a senior Pentagon official proclaimed this month that diversity, equity and inclusion will help the U.S. military achieve critical missions and make forces more lethal. “Diversity, equity and inclusion in the military are necessities for the United States,” according to Bishop Garrison, a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin who worked as a defense and homeland security official under Obama and a foreign policy advisor on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The military must be able to attract, train and retain minorities to keep a competitive edge, Garrison said. Across the Potomac River minorities were also the topic this month at the State Department as it announced its latest step to combat human trafficking using a “racial equity lens.” It is part of a policy implemented by Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year to better integrate “equity-based approaches” to address human trafficking by incorporating the intersection of institutional racism with human trafficking.

The DOD and State Department plans are part of a large-scale Biden administration effort to incorporate racial equity across all federal agencies. The initiative was launched back in January 2021 when the president issued an executive order to advance racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government. The president’s document claims that “entrenched disparities” in laws, public policies, and private institutions have denied equal opportunity to individuals and communities and that the health and climate crises have exposed inequities while a “historic movement for justice has highlighted the unbearable human costs of systemic racism.” Therefore, the order states, the federal government should pursue a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” It further says that “by advancing equity across the Federal Government, we can create opportunities for the improvement of communities that have been historically underserved, which benefits everyone.”

No federal agency is exempt from the racial equity directive and American taxpayer dollars are also being allocated to promote it abroad because the administration has made it a key foreign policy goal. A few months ago, the U.S. invested a million dollars to eliminate racial and ethnic discrimination, inequality, and systemic racism in Latin America with a focus on “Afro-Latinas.” Besides bolstering racial justice in the foreign nations, the U.S. taxpayer dollars will fund programs that encourage civil society organizations to promote and protect the human rights of communities marginalized by “intersectional discrimination.” The administration identifies intersectional discrimination as “multiple and overlapping social identities, including communities experiencing disproportionate injustices such as Afro-Latinas and African Descendant members of LGBTI+ communities.” Uncle Sam must intervene, according to the Biden administration, because “around the world, people of color, and in particular people of African descent, are disproportionately discriminated against, forced to endure high levels of violence and excruciating labor conditions, and are systematically denied access to justice and full economic, political, cultural, and social participation in society.”

Back in the U.S., the race initiative is in full force governmentwide. In late October the Treasury Department named its first ever racial equity chief, a veteran La Raza official who spent a decade at the nation’s most influential open borders group. The DOD and State Department efforts to appease the left began shortly after Biden moved into the White House. Back in the summer of 2020 Judicial Watch obtained outrageous, anti-bias training materials from the DOD used to train service members on diversity topics. The material essentially indoctrinates troops with anti-American and racially inflammatory training. Days later the State Department overhauled language used in agency materials that may be considered exclusionary or offensive, including preference for the traditional nuclear family structure and stereotypical gender roles. In its new search for information on conducting anti-trafficking work using a racial equity lens, the State Department explains that “because racism often compounds with other forms of discrimination to increase individuals’ vulnerability to human trafficking, advancing racial equity may also complement agencies’ efforts to improve equity more broadly.”