Trump's cabinet: All white males?

[Cassius]

I don't really understand the argument that somehow by selecting minorities (and women) to hold cabinet posts that these people will 'represent the views of minorities and women' or 'bring the experience of minorities and women to the table'. I mean, first of all, minorities and women are not a hive mind who collectively adhere to a particular set of views or experiences, something borne out by the fact that each and every demographic group had a statistically significant split between the two main candidates, thus indicating division within these groups. People harp on about how much Hispanics and women hate Donald Trump, and I won't deny that overall he is not popular with the majority of those groups - nonetheless he garnered the supported of nearly 30% of Hispanics and over 40% of women, indicating that there is a sizeable constituency within both of those particular groups that aligns, to a certain extent, with his policies and values, and thus don't require a tokenistic representative to convey their 'views and experiences' to Trump. Of course, those are only the broadest of the broad definitions of certain groups - for example, Hispanics are, obviously, a very diverse group with diverging beliefs, histories and more recent experiences (descendants of Mexicans who have long term ancestry in the United States versus recent Mexican immigrants).

Leading on from this, the idea that one individual can somehow represent a whole class of people is rather curious. Let's take Ben Carson for example, had he agreed to be in Trump's cabinet. He's perfectly entitled to his own views, doubtless formed from his own unique experiences, but, given the black vote in the election, his views clearly do not chime with a substantial majority of the black community. How can someone represent a community if their own views run counter to what appears to be the general opinion in their own community? Indeed, this whole idea that somehow the appointment of one person of a particular gender, race, sexuality or whatever their particular 'label' happens to be to the cabinet suddenly means that people of their 'label' are 'represented' strikes me as rather patronising and tokenistic.

Furthermore, sure, Trump could try to select a cabinet which is more diverse, but on the other hand, given that by far the biggest base of support for Trump and the Republican party is in white America, of course the cabinet is going to be generally white, because there are far more qualified white Republicans who's views tally with Trump's to fill the posts in his cabinet. It's just a fact that cabinets will always be demographically out of balance because political parties are always demographically out of balance. If you take Obama's current cabinet, 4/16 (25%) of its members are black, a figure well above the proportion of the US population that is black.  44% come from an ethnic minority, again, well ahead of the 36% figure that it currently stands at. There are no American Asians in Obama's cabinet. The Obama cabinet does not 'represent' what America looks like in the slightest, and nor should it.

I'd also add an addendum, which is that if Trump does appoint minorities and women to his cabinet, then a large number of this forum's posters (and probably a fair few real life people as well) will start complaining about them being traitors/quislings/'Uncle Tom's'/'House Negroes or whatever, for serving in a Trump administration, and will definitely castigate them for supposed incompetence. It's basically a lose/lose situation for Trump; he appoints a nearly all white/white male cabinet and he'll be the big fat white supremacist; he appoints a cabinet with a number of prominent right-leaning minorities and women and they'll likely have the above epithets applied to them by a not insignificant number of people on the left.