The Foreign Service Journal, September 2020

36 SEPTEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL There is a tendency in department culture to dispense automatic judgment based on inaccurate information, societal stereotypes and misconceptions. Ana Escrogima was the Pickering and Rangel Fellows Association president in 2010. LiaMiller was PRFA president in 2015. Christina Tilghman is currently PRFA president. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent those of the Department of State or the U.S. government. A 17-year veteran of the Foreign Service, Ana Escrogima is the incoming principal officer at U.S. Consulate General Montreal. She served previously as the office director for regional andmultilateral affairs in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. She served overseas as deputy chief of mission in the Yemen Affairs Unit in Saudi Arabia, established in 2015 after the closure the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a. A former Rusk Fellow at Georgetown’s Insti- tute for the Study of Diplomacy, she has served in Algeria, Iraq and Syria. InWashington, D.C., she was the special assistant to former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, with responsibility for Middle East issues. She served as a Diplomat-in- Residence for the New YorkMetro area, where she focused on reach- ing diverse audiences with the department’s recruitment pitch and taught a course on U.S. diplomacy. She graduated fromBrown Uni- versity as aThomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow and holds an M.A. fromColumbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. LiaMiller , a career Foreign Service officer, joined the U.S. Department of State in 2003. She currently leads the Public Affairs Office at U.S. Embassy Yerevan. She has also served in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, the Operations Center, the Bureau of Global Public Affairs, the Office of Middle East Transitions, the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and in Bolivia, Tunisia, Nicaragua and Oman. She is a 2001Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellow, a 2014 KathrynW. Davis Public Diplomacy Fellow, a 2015 International Career Advancement ProgramFellow and a 2016 Excellence in Government Fellow. She was named a 2018 Regional Foreign Policy Expert by the Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security organization, and was named a 2018 Black American National Security and Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader by the Diversity in National Security Network and NewAmerica. Christina Tilghman joined the Department of State as a Foreign Service officer in 2010. Currently, she serves as the senior public diplomacy adviser for the Global Health Diplomacy Office under the Secretary’s Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordina- tor and Health Diplomacy. Her previous overseas assignments include Canada and South Africa; Washington, D.C., assignments include the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, Bureau of International Information Programs, National Security Council and Bureau of African Affairs. She graduated fromHampton University and holds amaster’s degree in Public Policy from the Uni- versity of Maryland, College Park. She is a 2006Thomas R. Pickering Undergraduate Foreign Affairs Fellow, a 2018 International Career Advancement ProgramFellow, Public Diplomacy Council Associate BoardMember and a Council on Foreign Relations termmember. Foreign Affairs Fellowship program, established in 1992, and the Charles B. Rangel Fellowship program, launched in 2002. Once they complete the fellowship requirements, including graduate school and domestic and overseas internships, the fellows transition into alumni status and enter the Foreign Ser- vice through A-100. Department leadership, Congress and the American public all praise these programs’ success in recruiting talented, diverse candidates to join State. At the same time, however, a concomitant shift of depart- ment culture to value and develop the basic competencies all employees need to thrive and progress in a multiracial environ- ment has never taken place. In the Foreign Service, the burden of proving competency falls on the individual junior officers coming up the ranks, but the additional labor of navigating diversity at State should not fall on their shoulders alone. Over the years, the department has taken steps to expand the fel- lowships exponentially, but new fellows will succeed only if the department decides that ensuring their long-term career success—and the project of normalizing diversity at the State Department—is everyone’s responsibility. Confronting Misperceptions Until now, PRFA focused primarily on networking opportu- nities, professional development events and support for incom- ing fellows. At the same time, the association has always been an informal echo chamber for frustrations alumni feel about the challenges they experience in the Foreign Service—in particu- lar, the widely held but wholly uninformed perception that the process for candidate selection “lowers the bar” to facilitate the entry of otherwise unqualified individuals of color. Fellows are routinely asked whether they are required to take and pass the Foreign Service Written Exam and the Foreign Service Oral Exam; yes, they are—and that is after they pass a highly selec- tive application and interview screening process that mirrors the Foreign Service officer’s exam.