WASHINGTON _ In 1997, Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley was feeling disillusioned about her career as a diplomat, the job she'd dreamed about ever since watching a Peace Corps commercial as a girl.
She's African-American and, looking at the State Department leadership, "didn't see people above me that gave me hope that there's a place for me." Just as she felt herself giving up, she was sent to a conference on improving diversity in the field of international affairs. She basked in the company of other people of color who shared her passion for foreign policy; she returned to Washington rejuvenated.
Abercrombie-Winstanley went on to become the first female U.S. consul general in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, served as ambassador to Malta and held a slew of other senior positions involving the Middle East and counterterrorism.
Yet her success story is atypical when it comes to people of color in national security, which remains the least diverse area of the federal government.
"It's no longer _ and shouldn't be _ about being the first or the only. We're supposed to be beyond that," Abercombie-Winstanley said. "When (Foreign Service) officers come in now, they need to see people like them who are at every level of the organization."
The problem is considered serious enough that earlier this month President Barack Obama issued a memorandum outlining steps to recruit and retain minorities for intelligence, diplomatic and defense positions. The steps called for evaluating the fairness of the hiring process, rewarding senior leaders who make efforts toward inclusion and conducting exit interviews to find out why people of color leave national security, a field encompassing around 3 million people across several government agencies.
Minorities in national security welcomed the memo but said they would've preferred the announcement had come at the beginning of his administration rather than at the end.
A more diverse national security force isn't just about making the government reflect the population, they said, but also about ensuring that the nation's most urgent security concerns are tackled creatively by experts with a broad range of experiences and perspectives.
Traditionally, said Carmen Medina, a Puerto Rican who worked at the CIA for 32 years and served as the director of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, "people drawn to national security have been people interested in a black-and-white world. People interested in order, structure, power, American exceptionalism." But that perspective is just one needed to develop strategies for a complex world.
"I want some of those people, absolutely, but I really want a diverse community of thinkers who understand how it feels to be not the most powerful person in the world," she said.
Medina recalled how, at the CIA in the late 1980s, she warned that the apartheid government in South Africa wouldn't last much longer _ a view that she said wasn't shared by white colleagues, who thought the white rulers wouldn't cede power without a bloody civil war. Apartheid ended in 1994.
"Among my colleagues, at least one of them actually said the reason why I thought black-majority rule was more likely than he did was because I'm Puerto Rican," Medina said. "I was so struck by that. I thought, on one hand, well, maybe it's also because I'm smart. On the other hand, maybe he had a point."
Change has been slow. It was only in June that for the first time the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released demographic information that showed minorities as 24.6 percent of its workforce, more than 10 percentage points below the rest of the federal government's 35 percent.
Last year, a report commissioned by the CIA found that "over the past 20 years _ in several critical areas _ the senior leadership of the CIA has become less diverse."
Managers detailed a complex set of factors that keep minority numbers low _ from marginalized communities' historical mistrust of "The Man" to entrenched white networks that don't welcome outsiders.
Malcolm Nance credits the clique system for helping steer his intelligence career _ away from what he initially was interested in, Russia. In the Cold War era, he entered the intelligence community as a Russian linguist but was stymied by what he summed up in a word: "racism." After stalling for nearly two months on a Russian slot, Nance recalled, his supervisors gave him a choice _ Korean or Arabic.
The decision for Arabic set him on a course that made him today perhaps the most visible African-American commentator on international terrorism and torture.
"My middle name for 20 years was 'Black Guy Who Speaks Arabic,'" he said, recalling racism that at times was shockingly overt, especially at far-flung posts where "you can get away with a lot in a building with no windows and cipher locks on every door."
He once filed an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint after someone left racist materials on his desk. "They had mine investigated by a guy who wasn't cleared to enter my building and who was the commanding officer's golfing partner," Nance said. "He said, 'You should just let this go. This stuff is going to happen from time to time.'"
In a blog post on the president's announcement this month, national security adviser Susan Rice, an African-American, listed more statistics showing how the national security arena "has not yet drawn fully" from the diverse U.S. population. Minorities make up less than 20 percent of senior diplomats and 15 percent of senior military and intelligence officials, she wrote, even though "nearly 40 percent of the approximately 320 million people in the United States are minorities."
The numbers come to life in Washington every day at briefings and think tanks where participants _ overwhelmingly white and mostly men _ shape how the United States protects itself and engages with the rest of the world. People of color often speak of the isolation of being "the only" in such rarefied spaces and seek one another out to commiserate.
But they also take pride in their presence, especially when they're able to sway a discussion or offer new perspective that might've been overlooked by white colleagues.
"Sometimes I think groups are better able to hear what I'm saying because I walk in and I'm unexpected," Abercrombie-Winstanley said, recounting how her race sometimes gave her an upper hand in negotiations with foreign counterparts. "You see their heads lean back a little bit, their eyebrows go up and they go, 'Oh.' I take advantage of that when it happens."
Reuben Brigety, a veteran diplomat who's now the dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, shared similar stories.
"I can't tell you the number of times when I was engaging with foreign African interlocutors who would tell me after we've done our business, having tea and coffee, how proud they were of me. Seeing a young African-American man representing the United States as an ambassador, as a deputy secretary of state," Brigety said. "That gets you, frankly, an awful long way in developing trust so you can advance the interest of your country."
However, he warned, the opposite is also true. If the United States touts itself as an example for other nations of a pluralistic democratic society, he said, then "when our national security establishment does not reflect that idea, it frankly calls that very nature of our country into question by others."
Brigety is no stranger to being the only African-American in his circles. His parents grew up in segregation-era Florida, where his father and a classmate were the first two African-Americans to graduate from the University of Florida medical school. The family moved to an almost exclusively white neighborhood, and Brigety was one of the very few black students at his grade school, junior high and high school.
The numbers weren't much better when he attended the U.S. Naval Academy and were worse when he went to England to study at Cambridge, where "you could count the number of African-Americans on one hand, two if there was a conference in town."
The lack of African-American peers continued throughout his career in nearly every part of national security: He served at the Pentagon, worked in the arms division of Human Rights Watch, held senior humanitarian posts at the State Department and became the U.S. ambassador to the African Union. Even now, he said, he's the only African-American dean of a college devoted purely to international affairs.
Brigety said one hurdle to progress was the widespread notion that "one has to trade diversity for quality." In fact, he said, the converse is true: Only by expanding recruiting efforts beyond established pools can managers be sure they've found the best candidates. That requires supervisors _ often white men _ to buy into the spirit of Obama's memorandum and put in the work to build a pipeline robust enough to change the face of the national security establishment.
"The numbers are so, so small that it's _ I won't say it's inexcusable _ but I will say it doesn't have to be that way," Brigety said.
