The appointments of Judge Sotomayor and Regina Benjamin are exciting for several reasons:

1. Their appointments show that Obama is bringing senior people of colour in underneath him, rather than becoming our token ‘President of Colour’. This means that real, pervasive, systemic change has a greater chance of happening. Who among us isn’t excited by that? How many times have we seen someone get to the top, and then not do this–and then watched as after their reign, the waters close as over a dropped stone, and nothing has changed.

The now famous comment about Judge Sotomayor’s ‘ethnicity’ reveals how scared certain populations are of pervasive change. The notion that white people inhabit some neutral, non-’ethnic’ space, (and the related notion that men inhabit a weird non-gendered space–the one in which the word ‘man’ is said to refer to all of us) is one that I’m sure we all agree has prevailed for too long. It may be about to shift, which will challenge us all, especially those of us who are white. I know that my view of the world has been, and still frequently is, seriously challenged by the very different experiences of friends of colour. This isn’t always easy, and doesn’t lead automatically to agreement, but the challenge of (sometimes vastly) differing truths is necessary if we are to create a world that is sustainable for all of us (not just some). And that world is vital if we want to have even a slim change of peaceful co-existence as our global population zooms.

2. The payoff for allowing ourselves to be challenged by each others’ differing points of view is this: We all get better service when we include the experience and expertise of all of us, not just of one or two isolated groups. So it’s exciting that Obama is clearly looking at a wider pool of expertise than the usual one of institutionalised white blokes in their fifties. Sorry fifty-something white blokes, many of you are cool, and you know who you are, so don’t take this as a personal attack. I am sure you will agree that when we widen the pool, we not only get access to many more people with expertise and experience, but we also get access to specific areas of expertise and experience–and areas of passionate focus–that the smaller pool didn’t have. And that benefits all of us.

Obama said he chose Regina Benjamin because she has so much experience with the poor and the non-insured, which means a whole new set of previously largely excluded voices is going to be heard, and its stories considered. That’s going to generate new solutions to old problems, as much as new problems to be solved.

Interestingly, widening the pool doesn’t necessarily get you what you might think. Judge Sotomayor has a tough record on sentencing. In some ways she’s more conservative than liberals expect. This false paradox puts me in mind of Debra Dickerson, whose book ‘The End of Blackness’ makes the point that not all Black people are liberals, and that it’s about time we allowed people of colour to be defined by more than their ‘ethnicity’. Dickerson is a Republican, and Black, and proud of both.

3. By picking a new Surgeon General who has experience of the un-insured, Obama is fleshing out the ground of support for a new healthcare system which meets the needs of the people, rather than just the lobbyists, insurers, pharma companies and other professionals with fingers in the pie.

I remember hearing about some health care research a few years ago (on NPR, my continual source of vaguely-referenced data). The study found that white men get the best care, followed by Black men, followed by white women, followed by Black women. Interesting, that gender in this study weighs heavier than race.

Of course, the important thing is to avoid getting caught in that gender-vs-race trap in such a way that we duke it out in a false wedge-issue competition for the crumbs rather than keeping our eyes on a decent share for all of the whole pie. I have hope that the appointment of Regina Benjamin might indeed change the way the filling of the entire pie gets doled out.

Why is all this important to a site dedicated to sustainability? Because issues of race, class, gender and inclusion cannot divorced from the issue of sustainability and peace.

As Van Jones has pointed out, we cannot afford for sustainability to be a white middle class life-style choice that we have the privilege to indulge in in Marin and Austin and Sedona, while the vast mass of the country works two jobs, shops at Walmart and lives in lousy housing. The green movement needs to be a movement for all of us, and the movement to include all of us needs to be green–we need integration on a massive scale.