The lack of diversity in the White House

The current presidential administration is constantly making headlines for negative reasons, drawing public outrage over topics like discriminatory legislation, outlandish tweets from the president or ignorant statements from any given government figure. However, the president’s regime actually has one problem that does not get the public scrutiny it deserves: the White House is so white.

Diversity in the White House, especially among the highest ranked staffers in the West Wing, is dangerously low. Before we as United States citizens can even expect the positive change in rhetoric and action that we demand of this administration to have a chance at becoming reality, we must first require more accurate representation of the nation’s population in the president’s closest circle of advisors.

Journalists have reported on this issue for a few years now, but it is still often unacknowledged as one of the administration’s most detrimental characteristics. In early 2017, Jasmine C. Lee reported for The New York Times that the president’s first cabinet was shaping up to be whiter and more male than any other president’s first cabinet since Ronald Reagan’s.

This past August, Andrew Restuccia wrote that POLITICO could identify only six nonwhite people among the 55 highest-earning White House staffers.

Former Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault-Newman wrote in her 2018 memoir “Unhinged” that she held on to her position in the White House for so long despite her growing concerns about the president’s controversial behavior because she was the only black person in the West Wing. She says that since she has exited the White House, no other black people have been hired in the West Wing.

Just this one example of homogeneity illustrates how poorly the American people are being represented among the highest ranks of the White House.

Just over 13 percent of the U.S. population is black or African American alone, according to 2017 U.S. census estimates. Yet zero percent of their voices are being actively represented in the upper echelon of leadership.

Representation matters so much in government because despite the fact that all U.S. citizens share the status of being American, every race, gender, religious group and so on has unique needs and sensitivities that a homogenous group of representatives could never realistically understand.

Of course, it is not only black people that are being underrepresented. The president does not seem to have either a sympathetic or a strictly rational understanding of several minority groups in this country. From the Latinx population to practicing Muslims to LGBT+ people, he has slighted nearly every marginalized community with words that any kindergarten teacher would advise his or her students to keep to oneself. Without diverse sorts of individuals having platforms high up in the White House that allow them to effectively advocate for their own people, the president does not seem likely to think and act inclusively with the counsel of his current posse.

Flashback to the 1700s and one may remember learning about how the chants of “no taxation without representation” became popular not long before the American Revolutionary War erupted. With that in mind, let us get proper representation for all Americans in the current administration before another war becomes our only solution.