22 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALSUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020Struggle for Racial JusticeDiplomacy and Institutions
WASHINGTON — Tianna
Spears dreamed for years of be-
coming an American diplomat.
She quit in January after two, and
says she will never return to the
State Department, given what she
has described as its failure to pro-
tect her from racial discrimination
— from the United States govern-
ment — while on the job.
Ms. Spears is black. Her first
foreign post, in 2018, was at the
American Consulate in Ciudad
Juárez, just over the Mexican bor-
der from El Paso. Over six
months, she said, U.S. border offi-
cials pulled her aside about 25
times for extensive questioning
and inspections.
She was asked if she was a drug
dealer. At one point, she said, she
was told to not look a male officer
in the eye. The Customs and Bor-
der Protection officers questioned
whether her diplomatic passport
was counterfeit. At times she felt
threatened. And her white col-
leagues, Ms. Spears said, ap-
peared to cross the border easily
and without delay.
When she reported the
episodes to her supervisors at the
consulate, Ms. Spears said she
was advised against speaking out
and was transferred to the U.S.
Embassy in Mexico City.
“The message was: ‘You are
now in Mexico City — focus on
your job and be quiet,’ ” Ms.
Spears said in an interview this
month.
Officials at Customs and Border
Protection in Washington have
denied Ms. Spears’s accusations,
and said in a statement that it con-
ducted a two-month internal in-
vestigation that “found no evi-
dence of misconduct.” In its own
statement, the State Department
said it took Ms. Spears’s allega-
tions “very seriously.”
The State Department state-
ment also said it was working to
“increase the diversity of our
work force and foster a more in-
clusive organization.” But Ms.
Spears’s case, first revealed in a
blog post that she published last
month after the killing of George
Floyd, has struck a nerve in the
American diplomatic corps.
It illustrated what current and
former officials described as a
State Department culture of en-
demic slights and disparaging
treatment of employees who are
people of color and women,
prompting their exodus and
whitewashing diversity from the
face of the United States abroad.
Last week, the American Em-
bassy in Seoul removed a Black
Lives Matter banner that had
hung from its building for three
days. It had meant to show “our
support for the fight against racial
injustice and police brutality as
we strive to be a more inclusive &
just society,” according to the mis-
sion’s official Twitter site.
Officials later said it was taken
down to avoid any appearance of
support to any specific organiza-
tion, even though the American
ambassador in Seoul, Harry B.
Harris Jr., had tweeted a picture of
it to note that with “diversity we
gain our strength.” Mr. Harris is
Japanese-American.
That was followed by the depar-
ture of the department’s only Afri-
can-American assistant secretary
of state, who resigned over Presi-
dent Trump’s heavy-handed re-
sponse against mostly peaceful
protests that have demanded
greater equality for black people
after the deaths of Mr. Floyd and
others in cases of police brutality.
“The president’s comments and
actions surrounding racial injus-
tice and Black Americans cut
sharply against my core values
and convictions,” Mary Elizabeth
Taylor, a political appointee who
oversaw the State Department’s
interaction with Congress, wrote
in her resignation letter.
That the State Department has
long been filled with “pale, male
and Yale” diplomats, as the com-
mon refrain goes, is well estab-
lished. What is new is what Uzra
Zeya, a former acting assistant
secretary of state who is Indian-
American, described as an oppor-
tunity in “this watershed moment
for America” amid a national con-
versation about eradicating dis-
crimination.
Ms. Zeya, who retired in 2018 af-
ter 27 years in the Foreign Serv-
ice, said that the conversation was
long overdue at the State Depart-
ment, where she and others re-
counted futile attempts to report
bias or appeal adverse career as-
signments, only to be brushed
aside.
In her case, Ms. Zeya said, she
was given no official explanation
for being blocked from senior
leadership assignments after
serving as the chargé d’affaires —
the No. 2 spot — at the U.S. Em-
bassy in Paris during the Trump
and Obama administrations. In-
stead, she was quietly told that
she and another female diplomat,
who is African-American, did not
pass the “Breitbart test” — a ref-
erence to the conservative news
site that she understood to mean
political loyalty toward Mr.
Trump, despite the State Depart-
ment’s nonpartisan mission.
“I did feel that I didn’t look the
part, despite the fact that my per-
formance was beyond reproach
and bulletproof,” said Ms. Zeya,
who is now chief executive for the
nonpartisan Alliance for Peace-
building.
“It was certainly something I
never imagined,” she said. “And
the inability of the department to
address it was also profoundly dis-
appointing, and gave me no choice
in the end but to leave the institu-
tion that I had devoted most of my
adult life to supporting.”
The State Department employs
around 76,000 people worldwide,
about one-third of whom are ca-
reer Foreign Service officials and
Civil Service employees.
Black employees make up 15.3
percent of the Foreign Service and
Civil Service employees, a slightly
higher average than the 13.4 per-
cent of African-Americans in the
national population. About 7.3 per-
cent of the career employees are
Asian — slightly more than the 5.9
percent average.
Hispanic employees are far un-
derrepresented, making up 7.4
percent of the department’s ca-
reer work force despite account-
ing for 18.5 percent of the popula-
tion. And 44.1 percent of career
State Department employees are
women, compared with a popula-
tion that is 50.8 percent female.
Far fewer women and minority
employees hold senior-level ca-
reer jobs at the State Department.
Women make up 36.3 percent of
those posts, while Asians hold 5.3
percent, Hispanics hold 4.5 per-
cent and black people 3 percent,according to State Department
data as of last March, the most re-
cent available.
Promotion rates in the Foreign
Service, the elite diplomatic
corps, paint an even starker pic-
ture.
Data provided to The New York
Times show that only 80 black
Foreign Service officers and spe-
cialists were promoted in the 2019
fiscal year — 1 percent of 8,023
diplomats who competed.The promotion process is highly
competitive and, over all, only
1,496 diplomats were selected, the
2019 data show. That included 108
Hispanics, 106 Asians and 90 peo-
ple of other minority groups. Pro-
motions were given to 549 women.
The overwhelming majority of
promotions went to white men.
Of 198 ambassadors currently
serving in embassies overseas,
only three career envoys are
black; four others are Hispanic,according to the American Acad-
emy of Diplomacy.
In a letter to employees this
month, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo said that department offi-
cials were working “diligently to
find the best, most committed and
broadly diverse talent to deliver
excellence in American diplo-
macy.”
“I am proud that the composi-
tion of our State Department work
force also reflects America’s devo-tion to the principle of equal op-
portunity,” Mr. Pompeo said.
Fellowships and other recruit-
ing programs specifically looking
to hire people of color have been
underway for years at the State
Department. But in some cases,
they have also had the unintended
effect of adversely singling out its
recruits among their peers.
A former diplomat, Kashia Dun-
ner, joined the Foreign Service af-
ter winning a Charles B. Rangel
diversity fellowship in 2010. Dur-
ing introductory training courses,
she said, the award became more
of a stigma than an honor as white
classmates routinely assumed
that the minority students had
qualified only because of the fel-
lowship.
“I suddenly felt really ashamed
and embarrassed about it,” said
Ms. Dunner, who is black.
Later, while serving at the U.S.
Consulate in Tijuana, Mexico, she
said she was advised against par-
ticipating in Black History Month
events because they would “type-
cast” her. She also was told that
she intimidated others because of
her height, race and hair.
Filing an Equal Employment
Opportunity complaint became a
struggle that she believed would
make little difference, and other-
wise speaking out or pushing back
risked damaging her “corridor
reputation” — a peer-enforced
system with an outsize influence
when selecting diplomats for
choice assignments.
In 2016, while posted at the U.S.
Consulate in Erbil, Iraq, Ms. Dun-
ner earned an annual State De-
partment human rights award for
her work with ethnic and religious
minorities who had been victim-
ized by Islamic State fighters. But
at her next assignment, in San Sal-
vador, “my boss at one point just
told me flat out, ‘Your work is fine,
but we just don’t like you,’ ” she re-
called.
“How do you recover from
that?” she said.
She left the Foreign Service in- The State Department de-
clined to discuss the specifics of
her case but said in a written
statement that “if the allegations
are true, she deserved better dur-
ing her time here.”
Congress has become increas-
ingly worried about the lack of di-
versity at the State Department
and the number of diplomats of
color who voluntarily leave.
“People who bring diversity to
the State Department will help us
more than others, because we’ll
have a Foreign Service that re-
flects America,” Representative
Brad Sherman, Democrat of Cali-
fornia, said at a virtual hearing
this month.
As with other federal agencies,
the State Department is working
on diversity and inclusion plans to
recruit, retain and promote more
women and employees of color.
“We have built an inclusive work-
place in which every employee is
treated with dignity and respect
and feels empowered to serve the
American people,” the depart-
ment said in a statement in No-
vember.
Two months later, Ms. Spears
left the State Department, having
been told by an embassy medical
official that she had developed
anxiety, depression and post-trau-
matic stress disorder. She at-
tributes it to her interactions with
the border guards and “unre-
solved trauma” that no one was
held responsible.
“People are starting to ask
themselves these questions that
aren’t difficult, like if black lives
matter,” she said in the interview.
“The State Department, Ameri-
ca’s government institutions,
have a responsibility to create a
change. And the rest of us are
waiting to see how they respond.”
State Dept. Wrestles
With Culture Skewing
‘Pale, Male and Yale’
JOHN BRANCH IV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESWhile she was posted in Mexico, Tianna Spears, top, says U.S. border officials asked her if she was
a drug dealer. Above, a banner that hung for three days at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea.YONHAP/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKBy LARA JAKEScording to a transcript of the
meeting.
Monmouth University in New
Jersey said last week that it would
remove Wilson’s name from its
marquee building after adminis-
trators, professors and students
said that the former president
held abhorrent views on race and
reinstituted segregation in the
federal work force.
The decision contrasted with a
vote by Princeton trustees in 2016
to keep Wilson’s name on campus
buildings and programs, despite
student protests that led to a re-
view of his legacy there.
The university’s trustees said in
a statement that it had questioned
whether it was appropriate to
name a school for “a racist who
segregated the nation’s Civil Serv-
ice after it had been integrated for
decades.”
“The question has been made
more urgent by the recent killings
of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Ar-
bery, George Floyd and Rayshard
Brooks, which have served as
tragic reminders of the ongoing
need for all of us to stand against
racism and for equality and jus-
tice,” the statement continued.
Students in the Woodrow Wil-
son School of Public and Interna-
tional Affairs sent a letter datedPrinceton University will re-
move Woodrow Wilson’s name
from its public policy school and
one of its residential colleges, the
university’s president said on Sat-
urday — a move that comes four
years after it decided to keep the
name over the objections of stu-
dent protests.
The university’s board of
trustees found that Wilson’s “rac-
ist thinking and policies make him
an inappropriate namesake for a
school or college whose scholars,
students and alumni must stand
firmly against racism in all its
forms,” Princeton’s president,
Christopher L. Eisgruber, said in a
statement.
“Wilson’s racism was signifi-
cant and consequential even by
the standards of his own time,” Mr.
Eisgruber said. Wilson was the
university’s president from 1902
to 1910 before becoming the U.S.
president in 1913.
Wilson had overseen the reseg-
regation of federal government of-
fices, including the Treasury De-
partment. In a meeting in the Oval
Office with the civil rights leader
Monroe Trotter, Wilson said, “Seg-
regation is not humiliating, but a
benefit, and ought to be so re-
garded by you gentlemen,” ac-
June 22 to the university’s admin-
istration asking for the school’s
name to be changed, among a list
of other demands.
Renaming the school is “the
most basic step the university
could have taken,” said Ally Mc-
Gowen, a rising senior at the pub-
lic policy school, who is black. The
students behind the letter said the
university had not consulted with
them before its announcement on
Saturday.
“This is more than a name,” she
said. The students had asked that
the university underwrite re-
search into reparations and that
the public policy school’s faculty
and curriculum be diversified.The students noted their demands
are “nothing new,” having been
raised in 2015 by the Black Justice
League at the university.
The discomfort over the
school’s name was widespread,
said Ananya Agustin Malhotra, a
2020 graduate of the policy school.
Princeton had already planned
to retire the former president’s
name from Wilson College, a resi-
dential community of about 1,000
students that includes dormito-
ries, dining facilities and extracur-
ricular programming. But rather
than asking students “to identify
with the name of a racist president
for the next two years,” Princeton
will “accelerate” the retiring of thename, Mr. Eisgruber said.
The community will be re-
named First College, acknowledg-
ing its history as one of the first
residential colleges at Princeton,
AnneMarie Luijendijk, head of the
college and a professor of religion,
said in a note to students.
Julia Chaffers, a black Prince-
ton student who resided in the col-
lege, which is not affiliated with
the Pennsylvania liberal arts col-
lege of the same name, wrote in a
2018 opinion piece for the univer-
sity’s newspaper that upon enter-
ing Princeton, she “felt a mix of
excitement for the coming adven-
tures but also a discomfort with
the name I would now be adoptingas my home.”
“To name a residential college
after Wilson, while ignoring the
fact that he did not believe white
and black people belonged on
equal terms in the same spaces, is
ridiculous,” Ms. Chaffers wrote.
Residential colleges at Prince-
ton are “really central to your
identity on campus,” especially as
a freshman, Ms. Chaffers, who is a
rising junior, said in an interview
on Saturday.
Ms. Chaffers said the renaming
is a “really important turning
point” in recognizing other
changes that need to be addressed
at Princeton. “But it’s not the end
of the road,” she added.Princeton Is to Strip Name
Of ‘Racist’ From a School
By BRYAN PIETSCHThe Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, at left. “Wilson’s racism was significant and
consequential even by the standards of his own time,” Princeton’s president said on Saturday of the decision to rename the school.PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES