Donald Trump keeps appointing white men


President-elect Donald Trump announced his senior communications team Thursday and it is 75 percent male and 100 percent white. While that might at first seem like a coincidence rather than outright discrimination, the four-person team is actually far more diverse than many of Trump's other teams:
White men head all four of the most powerful departments — defense, justice, treasury, and state — for the first time in 24 years. Yahoo News writes that even as "the population of the United States is more diverse than ever," with white Americans set to be the minority in just a few short decades, "[Trump's] proposed administration looks poised to become one of the whitest White Houses in recent history."
Newt Gingrich has sounded the alarm, stressing to the transition team that "there has to be more Hispanics in the administration." No Cabinet position so far has gone to a Latino, the first time that's happened since before 1988. Hispanics are the nation's largest minority group.
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So far, Trump's Cabinet is 23 percent female and 18 percent people of color. Nationwide, many states are already majority people of color; women make up 50.8 percent of the U.S. population.
Three Cabinet positions have yet to be filled.
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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.
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