The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

10 OCTOBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The Roots of State’s Racist Legacy I was moved by the candor and cour- age of Ambassador Michael McKinley’s Speaking Out, “Changing Mindsets on Race at State,” in the July-August Journ al . There is indeed, as he underscores, an urgent need for a “genuinely open conversation about racism at State” as part of the broad national debate now swirling around us. Understanding the roots of our legacy of institutional racism requires examin- ing the ways in which the architects of our institutions built their racial biases into how the Foreign Service functioned in its early decades. One of the few books to focus on this issue is Martin Weil’s ironically titled A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service. Weil draws on a wide range of unpub- lished manuscripts and personal inter- views to paint a convincing portrait of how racial bias became embedded in the nascent Foreign Service through such devices as the examination and assign- ment process: “The oral interview before a panel of Foreign Service officers was really all that mattered. …The standards were those of a fashionable Washing- ton club. ‘Is he our kind of person?’ No one who clearly was not would pass. If a black slipped through the net, he was sent to Liberia until he resigned.” Some of the most striking evidence of the racial views of one of the first generations of FSOs is contained in the diaries of George Kennan, edited by his- torian Frank Costigliola and published in 2014. It is jarring to read of Kennan’s complaint, after returning to the United States fromMoscow in 1937, that the “buses to Alexandria are full of negroes and unhealthy, unbeautiful whites.” The following year, in an unpublished LETTERS book draft Kennan advocated denying Blacks voting rights since “we are kinder to those who, like our children, are openly dependent on our kindness than to those who are nominally able to look after themselves.” Thirty years later, during his first visit to Africa, Kennan would write that there was no reason “to suppose that a reversal of South African policy designed to force racial integration on a reluctant white population by legislative enactment would have consequences any more attractive than those which just such a policy seems to have produced on many a number of great American cities.” As we approach the outskirts of the centenary of the Rogers Act, signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on May 24, 1924, we should not forget that on that very same day Coolidge also signed the National Origins Act of 1924, deemed a “triumph for racial theory and racial classification.” Although the leaders of the new Foreign Service did not succeed in convincing Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes to approve regulations to prohibit Blacks from entering the new Service, they managed, as noted above, to practically achieve their goal through other means. Coming to terms with the tarnished legacy of our founders, in my view, will contribute to the conversation that Ambassador McKinley so eloquently calls for. Bob Rackmales FSO, retired Belfast, Maine State Is Not a Bastion of Racism Ambassador Michael McKinley’s con- tribution to the July-August FSJ relates personal and family experiences with racism within the Department of State. In line with the old Foreign Service adage that one always fires back at criti- cisms of one’s country, I would respond that in 26 years in the Foreign Service, I never witnessed an example of white on Black racism, never heard one racial slur coming from a colleague. Rather, racial conversation turned on “affirmative action,” on what could be done to recruit minorities. The ambassador suggests that, in general, things are going down- hill at State. Why should that be? Although the ambassador claims that the vast majority of State employ- ees do not consciously discriminate, he lets no one off the hook; rather, he places the blame for endemic racism on “underlying mindsets,” on the “waters of inadvertent bias.” Now, that goes really deep, deeper than actual behavior and performance, and deep into the realm of “thought control.” Thought control, Merriman-Webster tells us, is “the practice by a totalitarian government of attempting … to prevent subversive and other undesired ideas from being received and competing … with the official ideology and policies.” Does the ambassador envisage correc- tive psychotherapy or, even, the use of microchip brain insertions?