Biden’s ‘Equity’ Diplomat Pushed Global Reparations, Railed against Electoral College By Jimmy Quinn
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appointee to a newly created racial-equity post called for reparations on an international scale and decried the Electoral College as a vestige of slaveholding America that must be purged, in messages posted to her Twitter account before she joined the Biden administration. The stances articulated in those tweets are likely to raise questions about the aims of the administration’s fledgling agenda on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
Earlier today, Blinken announced that he had selected Desirée Cormier Smith to serve as State’s first-ever special representative for racial equity and justice. Cormier Smith, he wrote in a statement, “will lead our efforts to protect and advance the human rights of people belonging to marginalized racial and ethnic communities and combat systemic racism, discrimination, and xenophobia around the world.”
Blinken announced the position’s creation in April, as part of the State Department’s effort to implement an executive order signed by President Biden on his first day in office. That order required every government department to come up with an “equity action plan.”
Although the role’s responsibilities are vaguely defined, the State Department did relay some information about its scope to Congress last week. Among other things, the special representative’s mandate spans work to counter disinformation, engage with foreign officials on racial justice, and promote diversity within the State Department bureaucracy, as National Review reported.
Before first joining the administration in 2021, Cormier Smith, whom Blinken described as “a recognized racial justice expert,” made several comments online that hint at the perspective she might bring to the job. Although she has since set her account to private, an Internet-archive website preserved her tweets through 2020 and 2021.
Notably, in December 2020, she called for worldwide consideration of reparations, presumably tied to slavery and structural racism.
“‘Repair Nation = Reparations,’” she tweeted on December 4 in a thread about an event hosted by her former employer, the Open Society Foundations, called “Re-Imagining Reparative Justice for Slavery, Colonialism, Apartheid & Structural Racism.”
“We can begin to repair our nations through reparations and healing,” she continued. “Nations because this is not just an American problem. #Reparations #ReparativeJustice”
Cormier Smith could theoretically push for a global reparations campaign in her capacity as special representative. According to a State Department email laying out the new post’s contours, the representative will participate in “interventions, side events, and speeches at multilateral and regional summits and conferences.”
While it’s unclear whether the special representative will be tasked with speaking on other, domestic-facing matters, she has voiced her strong objections to the Electoral College, which she intimated was founded on racism and slavery.
“Racism and slavery are at the root of this peculiar way to elect a president. In the 21st Century, it still submerges the Black vote. It’s past time to get rid of the Electoral College. #AbolishTheElectoralCollege,” she wrote in November 2020, after that year’s presidential election.
A day later, she returned to the subject. After a conservative commentator had posted a tweet asking whether “leftists” would still want to abolish the Electoral College if Joe Biden wins the vote that way, Cormier Smith posted an emphatic reply: “HECK YES.”
Until recently, she served as a senior adviser to State’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. In addition to the Open Society Foundations, Cormier Smith previously worked at the powerhouse consultancy Albright Stonebridge Group. Both organizations have been popular talent pools from which the White House staffed the current administration.
The State Department did not respond to NR’s request for comment for this report.
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