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Biden’s tokenism and the illusion of progress
In December, Politico put out an article tracking president-elect Joe Biden’s progress toward his campaign promise to build the most diverse cabinet in history. Titled “Biden’s White Guy Quota,” the piece goes through each of Biden’s picks, rattling off their races and genders, then notes how his team stacks up against the cabinets of previous executives.
It’s an exercise that’s absurd beyond parody.
The article’s authors observe that there’s an upper limit on the number of white men Biden can pick — the titular “white guy quota” — and still hit his goal. They make an exception for Pete Buttigieg, a white guy who would “diversify the Cabinet in his own way as the first openly gay Cabinet member.” He later was appointed secretary of transportation.
One would be hard pressed to argue against the slogan “representation matters.” There’s obvious value for young people of color to see folks who look like them occupying the highest positions of authority, and there’s something to be said for lived experience as well.
But there’s a word for crassly reducing people’s entire identities to their most basic demographic categories, then ticking off boxes until you meet an arbitrary benchmark: tokenism.
