Biden’s UN flambassador

Why is an international diplomat focusing on America’s history of slavery?

linda thomas-greenfield
Linda Thomas-Greenfield
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The US federal government may very well be the most complex human undertaking in existence, an immortal leviathan with millions of moving parts and thousands of distinct job titles.
Or that’s what it was, anyway. Now, America’s federal workers and appointees, from the lowliest to the mightiest, appear to have but one shared job: fighting racism, sexism and the other evil isms — and condemning the country that overpays them. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are now the Joint Chiefs of Women’s Empowerment. The HUD secretary is secretary of Reminding You That Redlining Happened 60 Years Ago.
And then…

The US federal government may very well be the most complex human undertaking in existence, an immortal leviathan with millions of moving parts and thousands of distinct job titles.

Or that’s what it was, anyway. Now, America’s federal workers and appointees, from the lowliest to the mightiest, appear to have but one shared job: fighting racism, sexism and the other evil isms — and condemning the country that overpays them. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are now the Joint Chiefs of Women’s Empowerment. The HUD secretary is secretary of Reminding You That Redlining Happened 60 Years Ago.

And then we have President Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. On Wednesday, Thomas-Greenfield spoke to the National Action Network, Al Sharpton’s organization for transmuting activist energy into money. In her address, Thomas-Greenfield indicated that she would much rather be ambassador to your local middle school’s anti-racism presentation in the auditorium:

 ‘When we raise issues of equity and justice at the global scale, we have to approach them with humility,’ Thomas-Greenfield said. ‘We have to acknowledge that we are an imperfect union and have been since the beginning.’

Heaven forfend that America joins a body as illustrious as the UN Human Rights Council without performing the required penance. For reference, the current Human Rights Council not only includes China, but also Cuba, Pakistan, Eritrea and Mauritania.

Mauritania! Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield notes that her grandmother was born the child of a slave. In Mauritania, slavery was banned in 1981. The government only enacted laws to prosecute slaveholders in 2007. That’s more recent than the Nintendo Wii! Even now, watchdogs think that in the country’s rural fringes about two percent of the population is enslaved.

But before we can condemn Mauritania for letting humans be held as chattel, America had better acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson (d. 1826) was a slaveholder. Actually, better demolish Monticello too.

Thomas-Greenfield continued:

‘I’ve seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved  white supremacy into our founding documents and principles… Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist. And in today’s world, that’s every society. In America, that takes many forms. It’s the white supremacy that led to the senseless killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other black Americans. It’s the spike in hate crimes over the past three years against Latino Americans, Sikh, Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans and immigrants. And it’s the bullying, discrimination, brutality and violence that Asian Americans face every day, especially since the outbreak of COVID-19. That’s why the Biden-Harris administration has made racial equity a top priority across the entire government. And I’m making it a real focus of my tenure at the US Mission to the United Nations.’

Wait, isn’t Thomas-Greenfield going to the UN? Does she really need to be navel-gazing about idiots in America who think turban-wearing Sikhs are members of al-Qaeda? The answer is yes: navel-gazing about every bad thing ever and tearing things down in response is the raison d’être of 2021 America.