The State Department announced “reforms” to its foreign service training program, including requiring or recommending the writings of far-right figures who have pushed white supremacist theories.
A fact sheet about the U.S. Foreign Service “modernization efforts,” published Wednesday, lists numerous changes the department is making under the banner of “Preparing the U.S. Foreign Service for the 21st Century.” More than 13,000 people work for the U.S. Foreign Service, which carries out the country’s diplomatic efforts abroad.
Among the newly announced changes is a plan to implement a “comprehensive basic training program” featuring “required and recommended” readings from “George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and James Monroe, selections from the Federalist Papers, and works from George Kennan, Angelo Codevilla, and Samuel Huntington.”
Those last three in particular are popular among white nationalists due to their unabashedly racist and illiberal rhetoric.
Kennan was a former influential diplomat at the State Department who served as an ambassador twice. He also once supported authoritarian rule in the United States, and his racist worldview has been touted by white supremacists.
Huntington was a political scientist who served in the White House, but later turned from scholarship to fueling hysteria toward Mexican immigrants. His 1993 “Clash of Civilizations” essay has helped fuel MAGA world’s anti-immigrant ethos.
The New Republic reported on Huntington’s last book before his death, titled “Who Are We?”:
‘Cultural America is under siege,’ he wrote. ‘Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s,’ he wrote. Huntington suggested that Mexican culture and values were different from American ones, citing observers who believed ‘Hispanic traits’ included mistrust of people outside the family, laziness, low regard for education, and an acceptance of poverty as a precondition to entering heaven.
And Codevilla was a right-wing professor and author whose book, “The Ruling Class,” made the argument that the U.S.’ era of slavery and the postslavery Reconstruction Era — in which enslaved people were granted some freedoms — were similar evils because, according to him, both stemmed from a belief that it’s right for “superior men to subdue inferior ones.” It’s a kind of false equivalence that mirrors Republicans today, when they decry antiracist efforts as discriminatory.
Let there be no doubt: The Trump administration is a white supremacist regime. Donald Trump has claimed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which has protected many white people as it outlaws discrimination based on gender and religion, not just race — actually hurt white people “very badly.” His administration has ended desegregation orders, sought to whitewash the history of slavery, and has routinely posted white supremacist propaganda on its social media accounts. His administration just recently cited white supremacists in its unconstitutional gambit to have the Supreme Court end birthright citizenship. And now, the State Department is openly touting racist teachings as vital to training its foreign service employees.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.