Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley Delivers Remarks Upon Being Named Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at U.S. Department of State in Washington D.C. April 12, 2021. (Credit: Department of State)
By Gary Raynaldo DIPLOMATIC TIMES
WASHINGTON DC – The U.S. State Department’s first ever Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley is leaving the post, it was announced today. In April 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken named the former ambassador as the State Department’s diversity officer to help make the diplomatic corps personnel reflect America. So why is she departing before achieving this lofty goal?
“Today, I am thanking and saying farewell to Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a diplomat with 30 years of experience, and the Department’s first Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer (CDIO),” US Secretary of State Blinken said in a statement
The Biden State Department in February 2021 created the new CDIO position at Foggy Bottom which Abercrombie-Winstanley, an African American, filled. And by Blinken’s own admission at the time, he said “the State Department simply isn’t as diverse and inclusive as it needs to be.” Blinken went on to say that as Secretary of State, his job is to ensure that “our foreign policy delivers for the American people.” According to Blinken, to achieve that, “we have to recruit and retain a workforce that truly reflects the American people.” Looks like the CDIO and Secretary of State Blinken failed to deliver. Truth be told, Abercrombie-Winstanley most certainly had a mammoth challenge from day one in her attempt to change the face of the U.S. Foreign Service, which many critics characterize as being a deeply entrenched, systemic “pale, male, and Yale” culture. Blinken, in announcing Abercrombie-Winstanley’s departure from the diversity post, stated the same line he gave two years when Abercrombie-Winstanley was installed in her position: “The only way to ensure our foreign policy delivers for the American people is to recruit and retain a workforce that truly reflects the American people. Thanks to Gina’s leadership, the Department has made significant progress to live up to our commitment to create a more inclusive workplace.” However, in reality, little if no progress has been made, despite what Blinken says, as the problem of under-representation of minorities at the State Department still persists.
“African American diplomats are still subject to harsh treatment from their own colleagues, some of whom use tools of coercion, manipulation, gaslighting, and enduring systems to keep the “pale, male, and Yale” culture alive,” Jalina Porter, former principal deputy spokesperson at the U.S. State Department in the Biden administration wrote in the Feb. 28, 2023 issue of foreignpolicy.com. titled ‘The State Department’s Lack of Diversity Is Bad for U.S. Diplomacy’
Jalina Porter served as Principal Deputy Spokeswoman for the US Department of State from January 2021 to June 2022 under President Joe Biden (Credit: Department of State)
Porter is an American political advisor who made State Department history as the first African American woman to hold the position from January 2021 to June 2022 working directly with Blinken. Porter added: “the State Department is an institution that has upheld practices of systemic racism that have often gone overlooked and unchecked for centuries.” She also wrote in her article that “a white foreign service officer whose personal blog is filled with antisemitic and anti-Black content, is still employed at the State Department.”
U.S. State Department / Foreign Service Far From Being Racially Diverse
“Despite decades of attempts to make the Foreign Service look more like the real America, it’s still pretty much white, male, and Yale,” according to a May 2016 article in Foreign Affairs. The article is titled: “The State Department Has a Diversity Problem”
“The country can no longer afford a State Department that is pale, male, and Yale,” Karen Bass wrote in a Dec. 5 2020 article in Foreign Policy.
Abercrombie-Winstanley, a diplomat more than three decades, was the longest-serving U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Malta. Earlier in her career, she served in Baghdad, Jakarta and Cairo before taking on the position of Special Assistant for the Middle East and Africa to the Secretary of State.
The Department of State Has To Have The Will To Make Changes on Diversity: Christina Tilghman
Increasing diversity in the upper ranks of the U.S. Department of State entails a “cultural shift”, Christina Tilghman, a career foreign service officer, said at a 2020 Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy Diverse Diplomacy Leaders Speakers Series. Tilghman served as Senior Advisor for Diversity and Inclusion in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
“It is a cultural shift. Our culture has to change. We have to look at how we are going to change the (State) Department. The Department has to have the will to change. We know, as persons of color, representation matters in the Department,” she said,
Tilghman joined the Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer in 2010. “I was the only Black woman and the only person of color when I first started at the U.S. Consulate,” she said of her early career experience at a posting abroad.
