The Officials Are All White

When President Obama was sworn into Office, the term "post-racial" was batted around — the idea that America had overcome a considerable history of racial barriers.

But seldom is anything so simple. And voting one non-white person into a high ranking office does not discount decades of bad cultural programming.

Take Georgia’s new Immigration Enforcement Review Board, for instance.

The board was created after House Bill 87 and is comprised of seven white male members. Governor Deal's communication director Brian Robinson implied that the members’ varied occupational backgrounds serve as diversity enough for the board's purpose. He also pointed out that appointees were chosen by three (Republican, white male) people – curtailing the chance of bias.

But Robinson is missing the point.

Race, class, sex, sexual orientation and other life factors do affect your experiences. More to the point, they affect your privileges.

Though I'm sure these white men have worked very hard to get where they are, they also had a higher starting point — birth in a first world country, less chance of racial stereotyping and access to higher pay and better education, to name a few. Different occupations does not count as diversity.

When governments fail to represent the people by including them, the priorities of many are overlooked in favor of the people in the room. We've seen this with slavery, suffrage, Japanese internment, Native American rights and gay rights.

We're not beyond our history. We're repeating it. It's not an accident that only the needs of white upper class men were served in our nation's founding and it won't be an accident when the Immigration Enforcement Review Board's decisions chiefly serve the needs and desires of these white, upper class men.

To suggest these board members can speak for and review the situations of people — people whose ideas and cultural ideals they may not even have access to — is absurd.

And they will be reviewing people, no matter how many times Robinson insists the board will only be reviewing local governments. If they aren't reviewing the people and community making up that government, then what are they reviewing — the buildings?

Including people as tokens is problematic. And members of different races and sexes on this board would not guarantee just rulings. But it would be a start. It would at least introduce the chance of objections.

Government is meant to be for and by the people. But when government creates homogeneous organizations, the only people that government stands for is themselves.