As part of a drive to make the United States “the world’s first truly multiracial democracy,” President Clinton has urged members of minority groups to enter our diplomatic services. He is right to urge this: Increasingly, the United States is represented abroad by diplomats who do not reflect the diversity that constitutes America today.
But, if a study that I recently completed of minority-group officers at the U.S. Information Agency is any indication, more than rhetoric will be needed to solve the problem. Those officers are so discouraged by glass ceilings and personnel practices that limit their chances for career-advancing assignments, promotions, and awards, that leaders of our diplomatic corps may be able to recruit few members of minority groups in the future.
By 2000, people of color will constitute one-third of the U.S. population and, according to the Department of Labor, more than one-half of all new workers hired. Yet members of minority groups are underrepresented in all five of the foreign services that the United States operates, despite some slow gains in the number of minority-group employees in four of the five agencies. (The United States operates foreign services at the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency, the Agency for International Development, and in the Commerce and Agriculture Departments.)
Since 1980, the proportion of minority-group employees in the foreign services of the Department of State and the Agency for International Development rose from less than 10 per cent to 12 and 18 per cent, respectively. The Foreign Commercial Service and the Foreign Agricultural Service also increased the representation of minorities in their work forces, to 13 and 9 per cent, respectively, but the numbers still do not come close to paralleling the proportion of minorities in the general population. And at U.S.I.A., the proportion of minority Foreign Service officers actually declined between 1980 and 1995, from 12.7 per cent to 11.4 per cent.
Does the United States really want a diplomatic corps that looks like America?
For most of the nation’s history, the answer was No. From 1789 through 1961, fewer than 20 members of minority groups served in the State Department’s Foreign Service (in those years, we had just a single service), either as career diplomats or as political appointees. Writing about the post-World War II Foreign Service, the State Department’s official historian noted that almost since its inception, "[t]he Foreign Service’s rigid entrance exam and its use of oral-examination techniques ensured that new recruits were essentially drawn from the upper social classes.” The 1960s and 1970s brought change, as successive Secretaries of State sought out people of color. More such recruits entered the State Department’s Foreign Service in this period than in all previous U.S. history.
Today, however, members of minority groups perceive the U.S. foreign services as hostile to diversity. American undergraduate and graduate students of color regularly visit the State Department and the other foreign-affairs agencies as interns and members of delegations to be briefed on foreign-policy issues. They have heard a great deal in the media about glass ceilings that prevent women and members of minority groups from advancing into the senior ranks of those agencies, but what they see is even more disturbing.
People of color in our foreign-affairs agencies are increasingly vocal when speaking to student audiences about being “locked out” of many units where policy is formulated and discussed (especially those dealing with strategic political and military questions), or about being relegated to dealing with “soft issues” (such as population policy and humanitarian relief).
Many minority-group Foreign Service officers describe careers spent largely in bureaus geographically associated with their ethnic backgrounds. For example, blacks serve mainly in Africa, and Hispanics are assigned to South America, in what has come to be called the “cucaracha circuit.” These postings offer little advancement to senior levels, because the regions contain few large posts where the senior management experience so necessary for advancement can be acquired.
Numerous studies, such as my own at the U.S.I.A., as well as complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and class-action lawsuits, echo the same message: Members of minority groups in all five foreign services increasingly feel that they have been relegated to a separate and unequal status.
Many reasons for this situation exist. General efforts during the past decade to reduce the government work force make it hard to maintain or increase the proportion of people of color. Making a difficult situation even more so, the American Foreign Service Association -- the sole collective-bargaining unit for Foreign Service officers in all five agencies -- has a vise-like grip on the flexibility that managers have to change promotion and assignment systems in each of the foreign-affairs agencies.
While officials of the organization recently acknowledged in the Foreign Service Journal that “the Service has lagged in diversifying its membership and stamping out discrimination,” they also noted that the association contains a large constituency opposed to altering selection and promotion practices in ways that “cost good professionals deserved advancements.”
Given budget stringencies, what this means in practice is that bringing more members of minority groups into the diplomatic corps, and promoting them, would delay the promotion of white officers who have been in the service longer than many newcomers of color. The foreign services lack both a commitment to making themselves more diverse at the senior levels and a process that assures people of color the same opportunity that whites have to get the assignments needed to win promotions.
Supply is not one of the problems in diversifying the diplomatic corps, though.
Since 1981, many of the 31 professional schools of public policy and international affairs -- together with the Ford, Rockefeller, Sloan, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, the United Negro College Fund, and the U.S. Department of Education -- have sponsored national fellowship programs to attract members of minority groups into graduate education and careers in public policy and international affairs. The result is a steady supply of people of color who are well-qualified for foreign service: Each year for at least the past decade, more than 100 such people have graduated from these programs with master’s degrees.
In addition, each year since 1990, 10 to 12 college sophomores who are members of minority groups have entered a multiyear Foreign Affairs Fellows program in the State Department to prepare them for graduate school and the Foreign Service entrance examination, which screens candidates for the U.S.I.A. as well as the State Department.
Among the first cohort of graduates from that program, six are now junior Foreign Service officers. Twenty-seven students in the program took the most recent examination; 11 passed it. The 40-per-cent pass rate actually exceeds that of white students. But the State Department is now terminating the program; officials have told me informally that they are doing so because of its high cost and the possibility that affirmative action is unconstitutional.
Government studies in the late 1970s and mid-1980s explained the underrepresentation of people of color in the diplomatic corps by asserting that members of minority groups tended to prefer careers in teaching, law, and the ministry; were not familiar with U.S.-government operations abroad; were less likely than whites to study a foreign language; tended to want to remain close to family and birthplace; and lacked role models. Subsequent studies in the 1990s have found that many of those assertions were based on stereotypical thinking. For example, when people of color who left the services cited family considerations as a reason, personnel officers assumed, with no proof, that the pull of family ties was especially great for members of minority groups.
Today, educators see what many people of color knew all along: There are still pockets of government where officials do not value or want diversity. Members of minority groups choose other careers in international affairs -- often in the private sector or with the growing number of non-government international organizations -- because they know that they are unlikely to achieve the assignments, promotions, or awards vital to success as Foreign Service officers.
Allegations of discrimination are at the heart of a case, Thomas v. Christopher, that the State Department is hoping to settle through a consent decree. As it stands, the decree would have the department grant retroactive promotions to some black Foreign Service officers and would commit Foreign Service managers to revise personnel procedures, including placing more emphasis on diversity, and training selection panels to be sensitive to racial concerns. More than a third of the plaintiffs, however, want to reject this proposed settlement, saying it will not produce fundamental change.
In a speech in September, Anthony Quainton, the outgoing director of the Foreign Service at both the State Department and the U.S.I.A., acknowledged the existence of an “invidious internal caste system, and, I regret to say, a culture of disdain.” As a result, he said, the Foreign Service had “failed to develop pride in our variety and diversity.”
America’s interests today depend on working with and in countries and markets that are multiracial, where our own diversity should be an asset. Ending the underrepresentation of minorities in our foreign services should be a national priority. But it will take more than fellowship programs -- or more urging by the President -- to make it happen. Educators can help, though, by undertaking more-detailed research to document how American interests are hurt by the lack of diversity in our Foreign Service. How does the lack of minority representation at senior levels distort policy making? How do the backgrounds and experiences of people of color translate into different perspectives about foreign-policy options and issues? How does the lack of diversity among its diplomats affect the way the United States is perceived abroad?
Moreover, those of us who serve as consultants to, or public members on, selection and promotion boards of the nation’s international-affairs agencies have a responsibility to challenge practices that close the door to members of minority groups -- the people whom we should be doing the most to attract.
Allan E. Goodman is executive dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.