Secretary of State Anthony Blinken appointed Zakiya Carr Johnson as the State Department’s Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer on Tuesday.
The position, which Blinken created upon taking office as part of the Biden administration’s commitment to instilling DEI in all facets of government, has remained vacant since Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley resigned in June 2023.
“American diplomacy can only succeed if it fully harnesses all of the talent that our nation has to offer,” Blinken said in a statement. “That is why I created the position of CDIO to elevate DEIA within our organization and give it the dedicated senior-level attention that it deserves. Over the past three years, the Department of State has made significant progress on this front but there remains work to be done. We will continue to pursue this mission aggressively, because recruiting, nurturing, and promoting the most capable workforce possible is critical to our national security.”
Carr Johnson has been on staff at the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs since March 2021, according to her LinkedIn. She also co-founded and directs Black Women Disrupt, an organization that seeks to “break paradigms of poverty, inequality and exclusion of Black communities in the Americas and across the African diaspora,” according to the group’s website. Carr Johnson is also the founder of Odara Solutions, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, and was previously a director and senior advisor for the State Department’s race, ethnicity, and social inclusion unit under president Barack Obama.
The diversity expert has a “fresh perspective on how we build a workforce that reflects America,” Blinken said, with a “commitment to inclusive leadership.”
In 2020, Carr Johnson participated in an online webinar discussing “intersectional feminism” for the Feminist Leadership Project. When asked what her definition of feminist leadership was, the State Department official said that “feminist leadership to me is essential.”
“It goes beyond saying that we need to have representation,” she said. “Feminist leadership actually takes representation two or three steps further. It’s not enough to just have women present, you know, filling seats, whatever you want to call it. We should be part of decision making, and decision-making that is critical of traditional systems, critical of how we’ve always done things, critical of the impact of our actions on women and all of society. And critical of power dynamics and how we use power.”
“There is a value ascribed to my complexion, to my color, to my history, to my culture, to my experience as a black woman,” she continued. “This plays out, not just in how programming happens, but also when you’re talking about leadership. How many people who look like me are in positions of leadership, and can actually help to shape the way policy is made, shape the way programs are designed, shape the way we think about the world.”
Carr Johnson noted that “traditional systems” stem from histories of colonialism, patriarchy, and misogyny. She encouraged women to “analyze those power dynamics on a day-to-day basis” in order to have a “better sense of what feminist leadership looks like.”
“The culture of misogyny has allowed men to act without consequence, and it becomes part of what we believe is normal, right? And that in order to make any change, we’ve literally got to be about the work of dismantling that traditional structure at every juncture,” she said.
The DEI executive was also an Atlantic Fellow for racial equity in 2019. In her biography, Carr Johnson wrote, “I believe that to dismantle anti-Black racism, we must remove structural barriers and recognise Black communities and Black women as valuable sources of strength, talent and ingenuity, and invest in them accordingly.”
The State Department under Blinken has placed great emphasis on DEI initiates. In February, the Secretary of State issued a memo titled “Modeling DEIA: Gender Identity Best Practices” to staffers on the threat of “misgendering.” The cable included guidance to avoid using the terms “mother/father,” “son/daughter,” and “husband/wife,” terms he said can send a “harmful, exclusionary message.” In 2022, Blinken appointed the department’s first-ever representative for racial equity and justice, Desirée Cormier Smith, to confront “systemic racism, discrimination, and xenophobia around the world.” Blinken has also appointed a “special envoy to advance the human rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Persons,” and has issued numerous reports regarding gender identity and pronouns.
While the Biden administration continued to embrace DEI, corporations and universities have begun rolling back DEI-related positions in recent months after the industry took off in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Since then, an increasingly vocal subset of Americans — and elected Republicans — have challenged the industry’s focus on race as toxic and regressive.
House Oversight Committee Republicans recently pressed the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last month to curb DEI and take “all available measures to prevent and end unlawful employment practices that discriminate on the basis of an individual’s race or color.”