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‘Like a Minefield’: Being the Black U.S. Diplomat

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Both State Department, Press Corps Lag on Diversity

(Homepage photo: “The American Diplomat,” PBS)

Journal-isms Roundtable photos by Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks

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At a June 15 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., questions State Department DEI chief Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley about the need to classify people by race. (Credit: Forbes/YouTube)

Both State Department, Press Corps Lag on Diversity

To some of us, the State Department is the place that issues U.S. passports, or that runs the American Embassy in some foreign country; that little piece of home where a U.S. citizen can seek refuge when in need.

The ambassador is the American who delivers bad news or good from the U.S. government to the host country, looks out for U.S. business interests, or is called in by the host nation’s leaders when they want to express displeasure with the United States.

The big news over the weekend was the aborted mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin, led by Russian mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin. It quickly became a matter as well for the State Department.

On Tuesday, the department noted those mercenaries’ murderous activities in Africa and imposed sanctions on elements in African countries doing business with Prigozhin’s operation, known as the Wagner Group.

It should be no surprise that there are racial overtones to the story; U.S. diplomats deal with a world that is majority people of color.

Reason enough for the State Department and the journalists who cover it to be diverse and to look like America, according to U.S. diplomats of color who joined our Journal-isms Roundtable Zoom on Sunday. In neither case has that been achieved.

“Why would it be important for Black and Latino/Latina journalists to be covering the State Department?” Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley (pictured), who is leaving her position as the State Department’s first chief diversity and inclusion officer Friday, repeated when asked the question.

“Because you know we spend taxpayer money. When we fail at what we do, that means U.S. lives are being put on the line around the world.

“It means questions that should be asked probably aren’t being asked during the press briefings.

“I’ve listened to them over the years. I’ve often [been] astounded that journalists allow the . . . answers we provide, since we’re very good at not answering questions. . . .”

Retired ambassador Charles A. Ray, who has been posted to Cambodia and Zimbabwe, added, “You need to have the right questions asked. An example would be why, for example . . . has there been sort of this fuss about African countries being neutral on the whole Ukraine U.N. votes, but you hear nothing about the other countries in other parts of the world that were neutral, and, you know, why this difference in the response?”

Abercrombie-Winstanley, too, mentioned Ukraine. “We support Ukraine, and spend . . . much money, and send weapons and spend diplomatic capital in ensuring that we and our allies support Ukraine. And allowing Ukrainians to come into the United States on a status that’s very easy for refugees. And yet Ethiopia is in the midst of a conflict. Many places in Africa are in the midst of conflict, where there is a much higher loss of life.

“I listened to an NPR story where they had someone from Latin America go and look at the resources in place for Ukrainians coming over the border from Mexico and coming into the United States versus what they were getting as refugees, or people looking for protection in the United States, and not enough questions in my view are being asked that should ensure that the American people’s interest in the fullest sense of the word are being represented, are being reflected, are being respected.”

Shaun Tandon (pictured) of Agence France-Presse is president of the State Department Correspondents’ Association. He acknowledges that, “The diversity level of the State Department press corps is definitely less than ideal. . . . Courtney McBride of Bloomberg News and Rosiland Jordan of Al-Jazeera English are both Black journalists and are on the State beat. Francesca Chambers of USA Today primarily covers the White House but has extended her coverage area to the State Department.

“I am not aware of any Hispanic journalists covering State at present. We also have journalists of Asian heritage (myself included) covering the State Department. This is among the American journalists covering the State Department; there are also of course a number of foreign journalists of various backgrounds on the beat.

“We have around 40 journalists in the Correspondents’ Association. Membership is defined as all the journalists whose primary workspace is a desk in the correspondents’ room of the State Department; it is not a dues-paying or application-based organization.

“I would estimate around 20-30 additional journalists also regularly cover the State Department – often foreign journalists but also some American reporters who only cover State occasionally when there is news of interest to them.”

The Journal-isms Roundtable video is embedded above. (Credit: YouTube)

None of the 35 people on the Zoom call could recall any African American or Hispanic journalists assigned to the State Department. Another 36 were watching on Facebook and 70 others on YouTube as of 1:30 p.m. Wednesday.

In addition to Abercrombie-Winstanley and Ray, panelists were Aurelia Brazeal, a retired ambassador who served 41 years in the U.S. Foreign Service and was the first African American woman to be appointed ambassador by three presidential administrations; and history professor Michael L. Krenn of Appalachian State University. Krenn’s 1999 book, “Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945-1969,” was the inspiration for  “The American Diplomat,” a PBS documentary on African American ambassadors released last year. Krenn and Brazeal appear in the film. 

We also toasted Claire Smith (pictured), winner of the 2023 Red Smith Award, a major sports journalism honor bestowed by the Associated Press Sports Editors, Nicole Avery Nichols, new editor of the Detroit Free Press and Yvette Walker (pictured, below), new vice president and editorial page editor at the Kansas City Star. Nichols and Walker are the first African Americans in their roles; and Smith is the first African American woman to win the Red Smith honor.

. The “diplomatic guests were more open and honest than I expected!” Melvin Foote, founder and president of the nonprofit support group Constituency for Africa, exclaimed afterward.

The candor was particularly true of Abercrombie-Winstanley, a career diplomat who said her departure was prompted by her need to spend more time with her husband. She used the occasion to summarize her tenure.
An appointee of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, she said she was known as a diversity advocate when Blinken assigned her to the job. ”He said we’re not hiding” the diversity problem, she recalled.

But the DEI chief said she was hampered by rules that said one could not “hire on the basis of a protected class” and by an exodus during the Trump years that reduced the pipeline.

Abercrombie-Winstanley left the department herself in 2017 — “and I say fired because [the] previous administration removed me at the last minute from the position I was about to take up and told me they didn’t want leadership for the office and made it clear that I could go sit in the library and do nothing and they were going to be fine with that.”

Add the presence of what the Harvard Business review has deemed “toxic rock stars,” defined by the review as ”a bully at work or a leader who delivers results but creates a toxic environment. These ‘toxic rock stars’ can ruin the workplace experience for most employees, but they’re particularly harmful to women of color,” the review continued.

“These individuals and the cultures that enable them are key factors driving women of color to leave their workplaces.”

The departing ambassador told us, “I’d say what has been left undone is accountability and . . .  ensuring that we’re not sending out toxic rock stars.

“There will be many people who will be very glad to see me walk out the door on Friday because I have stayed on them. But I have also put in place other people who will stay on them.” 

As the “American Experience” documentary showed, the issue of diversity in the State Department is one of long standing. While Frederick Douglass was appointed U.S. Minister Resident and Consul General in Haiti in 1889, it was not until Harry S. Truman’s presidency that African Americans were named ambassadors. The first was Edward R. Dudley in 1949.

“At the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, they were asked to represent the best of American ideals abroad while facing discrimination at home. Colloquially referred to as ‘pale, male, and Yale,’ the U.S. State Department fiercely maintained and cultivated the Foreign Service’s elitist character and was one of the last federal agencies to desegregate,” says a summary of the documentary.

The panelists told the Zoom session that many of those issues remain. Responding to the question posed by the Roundtable title, “How U.S. Ambassadors of Color See the World,” Ray (pictured), an ambassador from 1982 to 2012, said, “It’s like a minefield. You have to step very carefully to keep from getting yourself blown up.” The Black ambassadors were called upon to represent a country whose racial problems could be hurled back at them as examples of American hypocrisy. 

Ray said his response was to admit that the United States has such issues but was working on them, and at least has mechanisms to resolve them. The accusing country might try that approach, he would say.

Still, there are embarrassments.

“I remember once when I was stationed at the University of Houston,” Ray said. “I went to speak at a local university and I took a young diplomatic security guy from the local field office with me, young white guy. He and I walked into this professor’s office.

“This kid opened the door and held it for me. And I walked in and the professor walked to him first and stuck his hand out.

“And when he realized that the young white guy wasn’t the ambassador, it was the old Black guy with the gray hair, his face was redder than an apple. And you know, it’s that kind of unconscious, almost reflexive reaction, it still exists and people who say it doesn’t are either blind or stupid.”

Brazeal shared an incident from her ambassadorship in Micronesia.

“An American Caucasian citizen walked in the embassy. We all happened to be standing in the lobby talking to each other. It was a very small embassy.

“And he came in and he looked around and he said, ‘Nobody here looks American.’ And he turned around and walked out.

“And my entire staff sort of had their, you know, chin on the floor. Like, you know, what’s going on?

“So I said, ‘Well, look, if he comes back, we’ll have to help him. But before you help him, ask him for some ID.

“And if he asks why he has to show ID, you tell him because he doesn’t look like an American.

“So you can get your point across,” diplomatically, she concluded. 

At the White House last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is questioned by Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui on human rights and democracy in India. (Credit: Hindustan Times/White House)

The Roundtable took place just three days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was questioned at a White House news conference about a crackdown on dissent and press freedom under Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui asked Modi what steps he was taking to protect Indian minorities and uphold free speech.

Modi, who has seldom faced the news media over his nine years as prime minister, said in response that “democracy is our spirit” and defended his government’s record. But since the news conference, Siddiqui has been subject to online attacks from officials from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, including a party spokesman who called her a “bigot” on Twitter. 

Meanwhile, Indian journalist Vivek Raghuvanshi, who has reported on defense matters for India’s Defense News for more than three decades, has been jailed since mid-May by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation on charges of espionage.

Asked how the diplomats handle issues of press freedom abroad, Abercrombie-Winstanley said, “The focus is on trying to get people out of jail, so it’s not always a full court public press. Since those things often don’t work anyway . . .”

Ray added that “domestic issues can complicate your ability overseas to do that. And I was thinking of recent, I guess legislation or executive orders in Florida that promised to penalize bloggers who write things that the governor doesn’t like. Quite often [those overseas] read the U.S. domestic news even better than we do.

Brazeal (pictured) said she was “pretty depressed about the situation in my own country. . . . I see a movement away from freedom of the press . . . law and order principles of equality and justice and freedom. The right wing seems to be having a louder voice than in — as reported by the media — than voices against. I see us moving backwards, and in a sort of galloping way that makes me uncomfortable.”

Responding to the toasts, sportswriter Smith praised the award’s namesake, Red Smith, and said, “This award will be dedicated to my sports editors past and present.”

Walker acknowledged that Kansas City has “a lot of news going on and, difficult news,” but said “I’ve got a really strong team that does not shy away from giving a point of view about news when it happens. . . . Opinion is doing very well for McClatchy, which is one reason why I was excited about this position.”

Nichols (pictured) said “the outpouring from the community, in Detroit as well as our journalism community has been just tremendous. And encouraging . . . laying the groundwork for the work that needs to be done in terms of really, really connecting with community.” Nichols said she hoped to reestablish “some of those connections that we’ve lost over the years because of all the things, the shrinking staff . . .  the diversification of media. . . . “

The Detroit community saw in her appointment “possibility. . . . I’ve been here since 1997 and community members and people have seen me silently continue to represent our community and others at the table quietly, right?” To “be named editor after all of those years of really toiling, you know — and some have been bumpy as you can imagine — I think it’s just — it was an exhale, in a really exciting moment not just for me in our newsroom but, you know, many folks.”

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