Across the State Department, which includes more than twenty-two thousand Foreign Service and Civil Service personnel, the trend lines are more mixed. A 2020 report by the General Accountability Office, a government watchdog agency, found that although the overall proportion of racial or ethnic minorities at the State Department rose from 28 percent to 32 percent between 2002 and 2018, the proportion of Black employees fell from 17 percent to 15 percent.
Black Americans are even less represented at the higher levels of the Foreign Service. “As of March 2020, the Senior Foreign Service was 90 percent white and 69 percent male, with the proportion of African American senior officers below 3 percent,” down from nearly 9 percent in 2008, Uzra S. Zeya and Jon Finer write in a recent CFR Council Special Report [PDF]. Since the rank and title of ambassador was first used by the United States in 1893, only 156 Black individuals have served in ambassadorial posts out of a total of more t
With one day left in his tenure, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took to his taxpayer-funded Twitter account and denounced multiculturalism, saying it is