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# 									Remarks for Special Representative Cormier Smith’s Participation in a Fireside Chat With the Center for Strategic and International Studies							

Remarks

Desirée Cormier Smith, Special Representative for Racial Equity and JusticeBureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

June 30, 2023

Thank you, Hadeil. Good afternoon. My name is Desirée Cormier Smith, and I am the State Department’s first ever Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice.

Thank you for joining us for this fireside chat to reflect on the first year of this historic role, which I’m honored to occupy. It’s been almost exactly one year since Secretary Blinken announced the creation of and appointed me to this position, and I am grateful to our friends here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Diversity and Leadership in International Affairs Project for helping us to celebrate the first of what will hopefully be many more anniversaries to come.

I would also like to pause to acknowledge that we’re gathered here this afternoon on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway and Anacostan peoples. We honor their contributions and resilience today, and I pay respect to their elders both past and present.

As the Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice, my mandate is two-fold: to ensure U.S. foreign policy, processes, and programs advance the human rights of people belonging to marginalized racial, ethnic, and Indigenous communities, including people of African descent, and to build global partnerships to combat systemic racism, discrimination, and xenophobia around the world – NOT because we have solved these challenges here in the United States, but because we recognize that these are global challenges that require coordinated and sustained global solutions.

My mandate was created because the Biden-Harris Administration acknowledges the global nature of systemic racism.

Yet, there are many people who question the need for our diplomats to focus on racism in other countries. Why should the State Department be spending time, energy, and resources examining the effects of systemic racism and promoting equity around the world?

Well, one reason is that the State Department’s top priority is the protection of Americans and American interests. We’re doing this work because our country is diverse and multiracial. This work is about helping to combat racism, discrimination, and xenophobia everywhere for the safety of U.S. citizens inside and outside our borders. We’re doing this work to promote inclusive development, representative democracy, human rights, and political and economic stability around the world – and that is good for everyone.

Another important reason my role exists is because, while we acknowledge the very real and ongoing challenges we are facing here in the United States to fully address the long and lingering legacies of the forced relocation of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, we also recognize that these challenges are not unique to the United States. It’s not just us. Structural racism, discrimination, and xenophobia are global scourges that require global solutions. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk put it plainly: “No country in the world is free of racism.”

After one year in the job, I can attest to the importance of taking a critical look at our foreign policies, processes, assistance, and programs to identify ways we can better advance the human rights of members of marginalized racial, ethnic, and Indigenous communities, including people of African descent, and more effectively combat systemic racism, discrimination, violence, and xenophobia globally.

This work is important, but this work is also hard. And that’s why I’m grateful that this has been a huge team effort. I attended an event at the National Museum of African American History and Culture earlier this week, where someone gave me a shirt with a phrase in Portuguese. I don’t speak Portuguese, so of course I had to look it up. The translation is “Justice is a Black woman and she does not walk alone.” I thought it was so profound, and it made me reflect how this work has been and must continue to be a collective effort in order to be successful and sustainable.

Each of us here today in our various respective fields must ***all*** work in concert to uproot systemic racism and ***all forms*** of discrimination from our society and our global community. When bigotry, hate, and indifference win, we all lose. But if we harness the power of our collective brilliance in pursuit of equality and justice, we can build a better world that the one we’ve got now. Our country and the world are at an inflection point. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, and I believe that it is up to all of us to bend it.

My team and colleagues at the State Department are doing this not only because it’s the right thing to do. Our nation will unquestionably be safer and more prosperous when we address the deep-rooted inequities that are caused by global racism. When we defend equal rights of **all** people around the world — of women and girls in all their diversity, people of African descent, LGBTQI+ individuals, Indigenous individuals, persons with disabilities, and people of every ethnic background and religion — we promote stronger, more representative democracies, more stable societies, more prosperous economies, and more peace and stability – and that is good for everyone.

I’m looking forward to this conversation on how racial equity and justice is a core pillar of democracy promotion, human rights, and U.S. national security more broadly.

Thank you.

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