In a recent interview with the Washington Times, the Secretary of State was asked about race. She spoke clearly and forcefully about the inequities African Americans have faced in America, and noted that "African Americans have loved and had faith in this country even when this country did not love and have faith in them."
The interview received little attention.
So little, in fact, that Roland Martin, and African American author and journalist, publicly wondered why.
One reason may be that, race aside, the Secretary of State has not done a very good job advancing civil rights within the agency she heads. In fact, in certain aspects, things have taken a pronounced step backward under her tenure.
Despite the unquestionable obstacles the Secretary herself has faced and the many inequities (and worse) she honestly claims to have witnessed in her life, her legitimacy as a spokesperson for civil rights issues is tarnished by her own inaction in the areas most directly under her own ability to control.
Unless one defines civil rights solely in terms of the rights of African Americans, the State Department (with particular attention to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security) does not express the same love and faith towards Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, Gay Americans, and others that the historic patriotism and contributions of those groups should merit.
Digger, in the blog "Life After Jerusalem" has been closely following the inequities in the State Department's treatment of the partners of Gay and lesbian FSOs.
Concerned Foreign Service Officers continues to hear and see evidence of prejudicial treatment by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security with regards to the security clearances of others.
We also continue to hear stories of FSOs harassed by regional security officers and other DS employees for wearing head scarves or for taking a regular moment to quietly pray behind the closed doors of their offices.
As is the case with Gay FSOs and others, openly religious Muslims and Jews are also regularly subjected to workplace indignities from colleagues. While the Department generally enforces EEO as it relates to African Americans, it routinely turns a blind eye to other forms of bias. A joke at the expense of an African American colleague might get you fired. The same joke at the expense of somebody of a different minority group would be met with a statement to the effect that the Department's official policies are EEO compliant and the Department cannot be responsible for the individual actions of its employees.
And we have seen DS adjudicators cherry-pick laws from states which were neither the home state of an FSO nor the state of jurisdiction, to make the case that an alleged homosexual act by an FSO under their scrutiny was criminal (and therefore that DS's interest was not based on sexual orientation, but rather on criminal sexual deviance).
If the Secretary of State is truly of the belief that faith in the patriotism of American citizens should not be dictated by race, then she would immeasurably help her own credibility if she also opposed the free exercise of bigotry by DS agents and others.
Madame Secretary,
With respect:
Jewish Americans do not, by sole virtue of their religion, have dual loyalties, even if many of them support (as does the president of the United States) the right of Israel to exist as a free and secure nation.
Muslim Americans are not, simply by definition, supporters of anti-American terrorism.
Gay Americans do not, by simple definition, have loose morals, nor are most openly Gay Americans more vulnerable to blackmail than anyone else.
Naturalized Americans, even from countries which may temporarily oppose our policies, do not necessarily support the politics of the countries they left behind. In fact, most left those countries, and came to America, precisely because they oppose them. And many first-generation immigrants, including many of the founding fathers and mothers of our country, have served America with honor and distinction.
The patriotism of individual American citizens cannot be deduced from their skin color, religion, ethnic background or sexual orientation, and when DS/PSS routinely confuses religion with Foreign Preference, or homosexuality with criminal sexual behavior, DS is doing so improperly.
And yes, we know that you can point to token examples of FSOs in each of those categories who are doing fine, for now. And we know that the Department's rules are EEO compliant. But tokens do not excuse the prejudicial treatment of even one other person. And when rules are broken, and nobody objects, the rules don't really matter.
If your exposure to inequity and injustice has taught you to hate inequity and injustice, then stop them in the place you have the most power to change things.
And make your words legitimate.
Friday, May 16, 2008
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7 comments:
A reading of almost all of your posts has me wondering: are these unfair things only happening to the Foreign Service folks at State? Are GS given completely different treatment, or are there concerns covered in a different blog?
The short answer to your question is that these unfair things can happen to GS employees as well. The security clearances for GS employees who work for State are generally reviewed by the same people who review FS employees' security clearances.
And certainly the other things mentioned in this particular article (in terms of workplace attitudes) certainly affect GS employees as well.
There is a longer answer however which has to do with with two additional factors:
First, overseas investigations are nearly always performed by DS special agents, who nearly never have any training in the kind of investigation required for a security clearance review and who tend to view such investigations through the optic of a criminal investigator, while domestic investigations tend to be done nearly one hundred percent by contractors, who often work for companies that do only those kinds of investigations and are well trained in what they do. Thus FSOs who spend much time overseas are more vulnerable to the kind of investigative abuses we document than GS employees who may never go overseas. Some GS employees do go overseas, and many of the horror stories we have heard involving GS employees involve overseas interactions or investigations by DS agents overseas.
Second, due to differences in the core hiring legislation, a GS employee who has a clearance suspended is immediately placed on leave without pay (LWOP) status while FS employees continue to be paid until the resolution of their cases. While this may seem to disfavor GS employees, actually the opposite is true. Because placing an employee on LWOP involves a personnel action, and therefore is a legally actionable act, DS is actually far more careful how they handle GS cases, knowing that whatever they say or do may soon end up in court. Since FSOs are not placed on LWOP, there is no personnel action involved. There is nothing on paper to show that the employee is being discriminated against, and there is nothing to take to court. An employee can't just sue the Department because DS is taking four of five years to resolve his/her case. So DS feels freer to ignore the rules in FSO cases, secure in the idea that nobody from the outside is watching. As a result, dozens of FS employees have had their clearances suspended for a whole host of spurious and capricious reasons while GS employees, generally, do not have their clearances suspended unless there exists some legally defensible reason supported by some degree of evidence. GS employees often report being harassed by DS, and many investigations of GS employees begin for unfair or biased reasons, but when the matter reaches the thumbs up or thumbs down stage, many actually retain their clearances under circumstances where an FSO would have had theirs suspended.
Exceptions occur, of course, and many of the GS employees who retain their clearances remain subject to further harassment or bias, but those are the trends.
CFSOs does have GS members, and we encourage GS employees to join our cause.
Incompetence, bias and ignorance in DS's investigative and security clearance process affect every State Department employee, and hamper the ability of the agency as a whole to serve the American people.
Very nicely stated. I was obviously not aware of these things happening in the state department but it is intersesting to have you address it.
You make a good point that the SoS needs to address equality/discrimination within the SD, but do you mean that they should allow a more diverse population into the SD or do you mean that there is discrimination occuring against current FSOs?
If the latter, what do you propose the SoS to do? In such a case it certainly must be select individuals that hold prejudices against a group/groups of people, correct, in which case it would be difficult to monitor/uphold or even report such cases of discrimination.
Please understand I'm not attempting to undermine the post, but rather I am genuinely interested in what you have to say and what you have to propose as I have been greatly involved in challenging discrimination within the areas that I work. :)
The bias we talk about usually originates with the biases of single individuals in DS's employ, acting in their own individual capacity to express their individual dislikes. These biases affect the process at three key points: they can influence the conduct of an investigation or even the opening of an investigation; they can influence the adjudication; or they can influence the appeal process. Often we see investigations that should never have been opened. The allegation involved is simply not credible to any rational person, and would only be credible to a person with irrational fears about a certain group or with a personal axe to grind. Sometimes we see the clear expression of bias in the conduct of investigations, where information in what should be an objective process is cherry-picked (we have numerous witnesses tell us: I was interviewed, but what I said never made it into the report). Sometimes we see gross distortions and even fabrications in adjudicative documents, where things are alleged that are not substantiated by any information from the investigation involved. And in recent years we have seen the appeals process become nothing more than a rubber stamp of the original finding.
One cure for all of these things is exposure. DS should take seriously and investigate claims of abuse in any of these areas. In fact, we have seen, time and again, that complaints go into the trash without ever having been investigated. A few years ago we asked State's OIG to look into our caims. The comedy team of Griffin and Krongard, both of whom resigned after lying to Congress about Blackwater, cooked up a whitewash instead. We have been told by several key OIG officials that DS absolutely does not allow outside review of its investigative process. And they don't do it themselves.
As a result, what begins as a personal expression of bias/animousity or incompetence by an individual DS agent is not corrected by others, and is treated by the system with the same gravitas as if no bias/animosity/incomptence were involved. There are no (meaningful) administrative oversight or management control processes involved. Yes, a supervisor must sign off here or there, but no questions are asked, nobody monitors the process (OIG found that 60 percent of cases signed off on would not meet the basic official standards for completeness, either) and nobody says: "Hey, wait aminute, why are we wasting time, money and someone's career on what is clearly not a good case?"
Another issue, which we will talk about in a coming article, is DS's growing incursion into the world of Human Resources. Whether through ignorance, lazininess or the current fashion to revere without question all security services (by seniotr HR leadership), HR has recently handed off to DS functions which every other government agency treat as sacred Human Resource functions. In doing so, it takes functions which should be handled by trained human resource professionals, in a transparent environment governed by human resource regulations, and hands them off to security folks who have no human resources training, and who operate in secrecy, without any requirement (by the agency) to follow the law.
Human resources professions are well versed in, cognizent of, and respectfull of, EEO regulations and other laws and regulations protecting civil rights. The DS folks who, since the FAM was tweaked in 2005, do these functions now, don't have any of those perspectives.
Last but not least, greater diversity in DS would certainly help. DS does have a fairly diverse agent base, if you look only at certain factors. The issues are that certain key offices involved are not diverse, and that certain key minority groups are less well represented than others. There are many DS agents of African American, Asian or Hispanic descent. There are very few or none who are openly Gay or observantly Jewish or Muslim, for example. Where there is diversity in DS, it is a color-based superficial diversity that has little to do with understanding the ways people think or act.
Greater oversight, regular outside oversight, and greater interest by Department management in looking into these issues and investigating complaints would go a long way towards addressing these problems.
Did some new law get passed that allows gays to cover their friends with health care or allow them to make them dependents and accompany them overseas
There are two schools of thought in Management these days. One is the "old fashioned" school followed by many senior State Department managers, in which decisions are governed by the question: "What can we legally get away with?" The other is increasingly common in private industry and in more progressive agencies of our government, in which decisions are governed by the question: "What is right?"
What is right is not always what is cheapest, or what is the most conservative, or what is the most politically expedient at the moment. For these reasons, "what can we legally get away with" is a defensible school of thought.
However, doing what is right usually pays long term dividends in increased quality, productivity and morale, and often in placing the doer in a favorable position in the eyes of history.
The pattern of history has shown that when unjust systems are changed to improve civil rights, the benefits outweigh the losses. Being able to choose from the largest possible pool of talent and knowledge has a greater economic advantage than might originally be evident.
Slavery made economic sense. Jim Crow made economic sense. Both were legal in their times.
The benefits of allowing each individual to contribute to the full degree possible outweighed the economic benefits of either system. And made America a more just society in the process.
In the case you refer to, there is a large pool of talent in America that happens to be Gay, that is less available to the Department, and less likely to be productive if hired, unless relatively simple and comparatively cheap modifications to policy are made.
Additionally, your comment would carry more weight if the State Department did not treat household pets so well. In fact, however, it invests in the transportation of pets (because it recognizes the morale implications on productivity) but not in the partners of Gay employees.
It is hard to justify a system that invests in pets for morale reasons and not to at least an equal degree in human domestic partners for the same reasons.
The argument "we should do only what the law requires us to do" is a perfectly valid point of view. But (without breaking the law) we favor doing what is right, even if that is beyond the legal minimum.
Good piece. I have linked to and commented on your post here: http://lifeafterjerusalem.blogspot.com/2008/05/change-what-is-within-your-power-to.html. And thanks for the link!
Steve, I agree too with your comments...the Department does much that does not make economic sense because in the larger picture, caring for morale makes economic sense. Happy officers do not quit and have to be replaced with new ones, with all the training expenses that entails. The response to the letter from the members of Congress illustrates that the Department is just going to do what the law requires instead of what is right, even as it asks us to serve in more and more dangerous places.
I wonder if the Department would get more volunteers, without arm twisting, if folks felt the Department really had our best interests at heart. And I certainly can not say I feel it does.
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