The Patriot Post® · What's Biden's Problem With Black Staffers?

Joe Biden took office promising the most diverse presidential administration in history. Not cohesive, not experienced, and certainly not competent, but definitely diverse.

We’re all familiar with Biden’s biggest hits in the diversity game, starting with his vice president, Kamala Harris. The former California senator couldn’t get her own presidential campaign off the ground in 2019, even after she attacked her future boss for being a segregationist at heart. But Biden was determined to make a woman of color the next vice president of the United States, and lucky Kamala was in the right place at the right time.

There’s also Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest member of the Supreme Court. She’s soft on crime and apparently doesn’t know what a woman is, but she’s black and she’s female, so what’s not to like? And then there’s Karine Jean-Pierre, whose primary qualification for replacing Jen Psaki as White House press secretary seems to be that she’s an openly homosexual black woman.

Further down the line, though, Biden’s diversity pledge has faced some challenges. Lower-level black staffers are leaving the administration as quickly as they came over a year ago. It’s being referred to inside the beltway as Blaxit (not to be confused with Blexit, which refers to fed-up blacks leaving the Democrat Party entirely).

To paraphrase something Biden said on the campaign trail (i.e., his Delaware basement), If you don’t want to work for me, you ain’t black.

Among the departures are several staffers from Harris’s office, including her senior adviser and three top aides. Other resignations include the National Security Council senior director, advisers to the chief of staff, National Economic Council aides, assorted press and personnel aides, and public engagement officials. All told, nearly two dozen black staffers have left the White House since late last year.

When confronted with questions about why an inordinate number of diversity hires are leaving, one administration official was quick to say that there’s no cause for alarm. According to Politico, “Around 14 percent of current White House staffers identify as Black — in line with national proportions.”

Wait. They identify as black? Doesn’t such a specific declaration run afoul of the Left’s own newspeak?

In any case, administration officials also noted that 15% of black staffers have been promoted in the past year. Translation: They’re doubling down on tokenism with an occasional tribute to the Woke gods. Furthermore, several of those departing staffers are headed to other agencies for positions better suited to their personal career paths. Translation: They were recruited to the White House due to their skin color rather than their skill set.

Some black staffers anonymously told Politico they felt they didn’t have the support of their superiors, many of whom are white. There is a sense of disillusionment among them that the life they now live isn’t the one they envisioned when they took jobs in the White House. Some even said they were leaving to — you guessed it — spend more time with their families.

Is this some sort of racial conspiracy? Or is it merely life in the three-ring Beltway circus? If black staffers are feeling left out and confused, then maybe they weren’t prepared for the long hours, the low pay, and the lack of friends that DC jobs typically entail. Maybe the Biden administration simply cared more about the color of their skin than the content of their character. If that’s the case, it’s no wonder that so many of them have quit. They’ve figured out they were hired merely to check the “minority” box.

What we’re seeing is the damage done by making racial diversity the key factor in hiring decisions — damage not only to those being hired, but to the American people who will ultimately pay the price for this cynical social experiment.