Washington: A senior Indian-American diplomat has quit the US state department alleging racial and sexist bias in a Trump administration trend that she says involves “the exclusion of minorities from top leadership positions in the state department and embassies abroad.” Uzra Zeya, US-born daughter of Indian immigrants, resigned from state department after serving more than 25 years, but she has only now begun giving insights into the turmoil in Foggy Bottom, where she says there is purge of minorities, and suggests it is back to the time of a “pale male club” before America diversified rapidly.
“In the first five months of the Trump administration, the department’s three most senior African-American career officials and the top-ranking Latino career officer were removed or resigned abruptly from their positions, with white successors named in their places. In the months that followed, I observed top-performing minority diplomats be disinvited from the secretary’s senior staff meeting, relegated to FOIA duty (well below their abilities), and passed over for bureau leadership roles and key ambassadorships,” Zeya wrote in Politico last week.
It is not just a matter of turnover among a few top officials. Zeya says. According to her analysis of public data from the American Foreign Service Association, 64% of Trump’s ambassadorial nominees so far have been white non-Hispanic males, a 7 percentage point increase from the eight years of the Obama administration.
“President Trump stands out from his six predecessors in his failure so far to nominate a single African-American female ambassador; African-American women made up 6% of all ambassadors under President Obama and 5% under President George W Bush. Meanwhile, from September 2016 to June 2018, the share of African-Americans in the senior foreign service dropped from 4.6% to 3.2%,” she wrote.
Zeya last served abroad as the charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at US Embassy in Paris from 2014 to 2017. “Upon returning to Washington, I was blocked from a series of senior-level jobs, with no explanation. ... Colleagues told me that a senior state official opposed candidates for leadership positions - myself and an African-American female officer - on the basis that we would not pass the ‘Breitbart test’... One year into an administration that repudiated the very notion of America I had defended abroad for 27 years, I knew I could no longer be a part of it, and I left government earlier this year,” she wrote.
