Xavier Becerra, Lloyd Austin and the Politics of Diversity

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President-Elect Biden’s selection of Xavier Becerra as his Secretary of Health and Human Services reportedly came as a surprise to many. He’s not a doctor or health expert, some thought. So why should he lead our response to the worst pandemic in a century? The answer lies both in practical reality and in politics.

By and large, we Americans talk the talk of equality while walking the walk of social and cultural domination. Black people have, by far, endured the longest and greatest suffering; but they not the only victims. The pandemic has sharpened our focus on this point: our minority groups are both pandemic victims and vectors.

Here, in tabular form, direct from our own CDC, are the dismal statistics for our minority groups, presented as multipliers, with rates for non-Hispanic whites normalized to one:

Minorities’ Covid Suffering,
as Multiples Compared to Non-Hispanic Whites’

Minority		Case Rate		Hospitalization Rate		Death Rate
Black People		1.4x		3.7x		2.8x
Latinos/Hispanics		1.7x		4.1x		2.8x
Native Americans		1.8x		4.0x		2.6x
Asians		0.6x		1.2x		1.1x

* Note: all minorities except Latinos/Hispanics exclude them.

As the endnote shows, the increased suffering of our two biggest minorities doesn’t begin to explain our utter national failure to cope with the pandemic as well as other nations have. But it does suggest how startlingly unequal our current society is in things that matter most to people: health, wellness and life itself.

To put our Latinos/Hispanics in perspective, we need one more number. How many of them are there? As of last year, they numbered 60.6 million people, or 18% of our entire population. That’s nearly half again our fraction of Black people. It’s also within ten percent of the entire population of the United Kingdom.

So Latinos/Hispanics are not our “second” minority. In size, they are our first. Our only larger racial/ethnic group is the presently dominant group, non-Hispanic whites. Latinos/Hispanics are not just our biggest minority. They are our fastest growing one, too.

One last fact is worth noting. Among the 60.6 million are about 11 million undocumented immigrants. As I’ve concluded before, they comprise a class of modern serfs. Their constitutional “rights” mean nothing because each of them can be deported at any time, with a single phone call by a boss or disgruntled neighbor. And even if their deportation is unlikely, their well-justified fear of it keeps them in the shadows. It stops them from exercising whatever human and legal rights they may possess.

With these facts in mind, we can now appreciate the justice, if not the brilliance, of picking Xavier Becerra to head the Department of Health and Human Services. We can start with his qualifications: three years as California’s Deputy Attorney General, two years in the California statehouse, 24 years in the US Congress, and four years as Attorney General of our most populous and most productive state, the world’s fifth largest economy. While in Congress, he served on the powerful Ways And Means Committee, chaired the House Democratic Caucus, and was Ranking Member of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security.

As my own table for notable presidents and pre-Trump candidates shows, few presidents had as much experience before entering the White House. Add to that Becerra’s recent zealous advocacy in protecting the Affordable Care Act and its beneficiaries in court, and his rightness for the job comes into focus. He’s smart and plugged-in enough to find, hear and heed the best experts that science can provide. As a grizzled veteran of Congress and the courtroom, he knows how to value and protect science in ways that scientists themselves cannot.

But the brilliance of Becerra’s appointment doesn’t stop with his fitness and qualifications. It involves politics, too.

Democrats are the party of the people, as distinguished from the oligarchs who finance and control the GOP. Trump’s ersatz “populism” was always a con job. It’s impact will fade along with his marginalization and increasing derangement. If he really had working people’s backs, his first big bill would have been a vast infrastructure bill to put millions of workers into solid, well-paying skilled jobs. Instead, his first (and only) successful legislative initiative was a huge tax cut, the vast bulk of which went to the rich and big corporations.

So think about the opportunities. We have a minority the size of Great Britain living among us. It includes 11 million serfs. About 32 million are eligible to vote, more than eligible Black people. But according to recent research, only a bit more than half express strong interest in voting.

That leaves about 16 million “forgotten” citizens who might vote if they saw reason to do so. That’s over twice Joe Biden’s winning margin in November.

Yes, the last Congress brought 38 Latinos/Hispanics into the present (outgoing) House. Yes, the present Senate has four. But the Congressional Black Caucus, representing a smaller minority (with some overlap), counts 55 members of Congress.

Anyway, half of the Latino/Hispanic Senators—and the most notorious—are Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Think their “whiter than white” and “pull the ladder of up after me” approach to immigration and politics in general can pull in the vast majority of Latinos/Hispanics suffering and struggling nationwide? Does their abject surrender to Trump’s inhumane “get it and get over it” Covid-19 policy meet these voters’ needs? Can it inspire their first, tentative and fearful entry into politics?

If, like me, you answer these questions with resounding “nos,” you can understand why Becerra’s appointment was not just a much-needed exercise in good government, but a brilliant political stratagem.

Lloyd Austin’s appointment as Secretary of Defense is another such stratagem. But it’s also much more. Ever since Harry Truman integrated our military in 1948, it has been an employment refuge for minorities. It has stayed a step ahead of the private sector in providing equal opportunity for diverse patriots.

Colin Powell’s 1989 ascent to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs followed, in a natural progression of color-blind meritocracy. In contrast, Trump’s lily-white top brass has sent the wrong message, at the wrong time, to a people just now awakening (once again) to the ravages of racial and ethnic injustice. It begs diversification.

More than that. White supremacists gravitate toward the military because they tend toward the violent side. In a nation becoming more diverse by the hour, there is no way supremacists can achieve their goals without violence. They are heirs to the Ku Klux Klan, the Night Riders and other white terrorists who obliterated America’s promise of equality for an entire century after a misguided president named in a disputed election pulled federal troops out of the South.

It’s no secret that pockets of white supremacism still exist in our military and that a few lower-level leaders tolerate and even coddle them. As Secretary of Defense, General Austin will quietly and gently squeeze them out, as will his personal example as leader. In a society that for four years has begun descending once again into bitter racial and ethnic division, that may be the most urgent job of our next Secretary of Defense.

Another vital job is bringing military discipline, honor and efficiency to the national rollout of Covid vaccines. (Has anyone ever associated the word “discipline,” “honor” or “efficiency” with Donald Trump?) As President-elect Biden wrote in a must-read Atlantic article, General Austin is a tested expert in logistics under pressure. He planned and executed the drawdown of 150,000 of our troops from Iraq, while they were still under fire. So he’s the right logistics man for the vaccine rollout, too.

There remains a congressional waiver of the statutory requirement that Secretaries of Defense not be made such within seven years of active duty. Before granting that waiver, Congress should be sure that General Austin understands and will live the tradition of civilian control of our military and its proper limits. Biden’s decades-long working history with General Austin leaves little doubt that Austin should pass that test, too.

Like me, most progressive whites are delighted to see minority members in high positions, as long as they are well-qualified, as Harris, Becerra and Austin self-evidently are. Yet for the minorities they represent, these selections are not mere happy symbolism. They’re life-changing, eye-opening events. They’re proof positive that “there’s room at the table for me, too.” They’re real people that parents can point to and say to their kids, “you can do it, too.” Think maybe those eye-openers might increase forgotten minorities’ interest in voting?

Joe Biden may be a moderate on policy. But personnel is policy, too. By his selection of superior leaders from among women and marginalized, long-suffering groups, Biden can expand the Democratic base, bringing forgotten people into politics. He can help insure that by 2024, more than just two-thirds of us will vote. Joe is, above all, a “people person,” and his people will change us the right way, one experienced and attractive exemplar at a time.

We can only hope that Harris, Becerra and Austin are just three of many picks for those purposes. With our malapportioned Senate and Electoral College, and with the GOP hell bent on voter suppression and gerrymandering to keep the oligarchy in power, our nation must instill as much hope in its forgotten people as quickly as it can.

It was hope—not fear or outrage—that brought us Obama as President. The hopes of tens of millions of new voters, riding on strong, visible leaders who look like them, can bring us home, whether or not DC and Puerto Rico ever become states.

Endnote on America’s Pandemic Disaster

Does the greater pandemic suffering of Black people and Latinos/Hispanics explain the US’ dismal performance in fighting the pandemic overall? Let’s see.

Black people and Latinos/Hispanics constitute 13.4% and 18.5% of our population, respectively. So the multiples in the table above raise the total national case rate by following fraction:

0.134 x 2.6 + 0.185 x 2.8 = 0.8664

They raise the total death rate by the following fraction:

0.134 x 2.1 + 0.185 x 1.1 = 0.4849

Thus the Black and Hispanic populations together raise the national case rate by a factor of 1.8664 and the national death rate by a factor of 1.4849.

Yet here are the case and death rates (per one million population) for a few selected properly responding countries, as compared to the US’, derived from this source:

Comparative Covid Suffering in Selected Nations

Country		Case Rate		Death Rate		Multipliers of US Rates (Case and Death Rates)
USA		34,781		762		1 and 1
Germany		9,746		154		3.57 and 4.94
Canada		7,980		291		4.35 and 2.61
Australia		1,083		35		32.1 and 21.77
Japan		935		15		37.5 and 50.8
South Korea		561		10		61.99 and 76.2

So the increases in case and death rates due to the US’ Black and Latino/Hispanic populations’ greater suffering come nowhere near to explaining the discrepancies between the US and nations that properly managed their response to the virus. In fact, the US is number one in both case and death rates on this worldwide chart of Covid suffering. The Trump Administration’s incompetence and mixed messaging has brought disaster to every one our many races and ethnic groups, killing 280,000 of us and counting.

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