Dangerously Lacking in Diversity

Dr. Susan Rice, one of the most accomplished African-American women in foreign policy, on why there aren’t enough people following in her footsteps and what we can do about it.

Wednesday December 14, 2005

Campus Progress sat down with Dr. Susan Rice, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and President Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. The following is an edited transcript of our talk.

I ended up in international security somewhat by accident. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I always thought I would go to law school and work as a legal advocate on domestic concerns—poverty and inequality, race issues or workforce development.

But then I went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship – which provided me an interesting opportunity to study something new: international affairs, from the perspective of a foreign country. And so I did my Master’s in International Relations and became quite taken by the importance and complexity of the issues.

But then I had to decide whether to go to law school (as I had originally planned) or to continue at Oxford and turn my Master’s degree into a doctoral degree. And I had a very interesting conversation with somebody who had quite an impact on me, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who at the time was a professor of law at Georgetown University. I was sort of laying out this dilemma to her and she said—and I guess I was 23 at the time—“How long will it take you to get your doctorate?” I said: “Probably about another two to three years.” She said, “You’ll be 25 or 26 when you’re done.” And I said, “Yeah.” She replied: “Well, if after that you still want to go to law school, you’re not going to be too old.” True, I hadn’t thought about it that way. Then, she said something like: “African-American lawyers are pretty much a dime a dozen. But very few African-Americans have gone into the field of international relations. So if you are interested in it, if your heart’s in it, why not get that degree?” I thought that made a huge amount of sense and it was also was very consistent with my gut.

So I did my doctoral thesis on the transition of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe between 1979 and 1980. It was a case study of peacekeeping and conflict resolution as conducted not by the UN or the US, but by the Commonwealth. It was a unique opportunity to write a living history, because so many of the crucial players were still alive and, yet, had sufficient distance from the events to be willing to talk about them candidly.

Susan Rice at the Campus Progress National Student Conference

After two years in my first job at the NSC, I went on to become Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs. I ran the Africa office of the NSC for about two and a half years. In the first year of the President’s second term, I went over to the State Department as Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, having had a baby in between. I’ve now been at Brookings since 2002.

My big conclusion about how to live one’s professional life is to do what you want to do as opposed what you think you ought to do. And by that I mean, if you’re excited about something and passionate about it, that’s what you ought to do. I never really wanted to practice law, but I thought I needed the law degree to be the sort of policy advocate that I wanted to be. I guess I saw it as a means to an end as opposed to a desirable end in itself. And that was not a good reason, by itself, to go to law school.

But, the one thing about Congresswoman Norton’s advice that I really hadn’t fully appreciated at the time was about how few African-Americans had chosen to go into international affairs. I knew in relative terms, and intuitively, that she was right, but I had no idea how few there were. And I remain shocked and disturbed by that.

There are several factors I attribute that to. First of all, until recently, there were few role models. For better or for worse, I think that having Colin Powell succeeded by Condoleezza Rice will at least cause young African-Americans (and hopefully also other minorities) to see a career in international affairs as a possibility—something they might think of that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

When I was growing up, we had heard about and read about Ralph Bunche but that was a long time ago, and I was too young to know him through anything other than history books. And then there were prominent leaders like Ambassador Donald McHenry and Ambassador Andrew Young who served at the United Nations. There was also a whole cadre of senior African-American Foreign Service officers, but I didn’t have much awareness of them until I joined the field. These were the role models – relatively few and far between. I don’t recall any of them being women, and none had achieved the profile and rank of National Security Adviser or Secretary of State.

Second is the nature of the career path. Most people who choose to join the field do so as career Foreign Service officers or career military officers. And there are a number of African-Americans—but by no means enough—who are senior career Foreign Service officers and senior career military officers. But that path is long and painstaking. Relatively few rise to the top as ambassadors or flag officers. And so most people must look at the field and see it as a very long-term investment, with quite uncertain payoff relative to some other professions, like law or medicine or business, where you can succeed and gain prominence and wealth quickly in some cases and at a relatively early age by comparison.

Third, I think there’s the wider phenomenon of the pipeline of African-Americans going into graduate schools. I don’t have a statistical basis for all of these impressions, but, anecdotally, I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of African-Americans who do go onto graduate degrees do so in professional schools: education, law, medicine and, to a lesser extent, business. Very few, in relative terms, are going into the social sciences and those that do often end up in academia. Of the subset who don’t end up in academia, fewer still are actually in political science or international relations. So the numbers aren’t there.

Addressing this problem should be a matter of public policy. It is dangerous and extremely short-sighted of us as the world’s leading power in a highly-integrated and increasingly globalized, complicated world to have a cadre of people who make our national security policy decisions that are as lacking in diversity as the current cadre, myself included. We ought to have African-Americans and Hispanics and Native Americans and East Asians and South Asians and Muslims and Buddhists and people of various backgrounds, ethnicities, language skills, social and economic experiences, actively drawn into our national security policy-making world. Without that, I think we are playing with one hand tied behind our back. Not only are we not taking advantage of the wisdom and insights that come from diversity, but I don’t think we are showing the world who we are as a nation. We are not sufficiently sensitive to the message that it sends to the rest of the world when we are one thing in reality and present ourselves to the world as something else. It’s another form of hypocrisy that doesn’t go unnoticed.

Progressives, I think, bear a particular burden in this regard. We have thought of ourselves traditionally as inclusive and embracing of diversity and as people who believe in equality of opportunity. But we’re not walking the talk. We’re not embracing this imperative aggressively. I don’t hear it often discussed in the circles that I am a part of, which continue to be predominantly male, and almost universally white. We need to realize that progressives may soon be perceived to be relatively indifferent to this set of issues. Unless we show that we’re not, we will be unfavorably contrasted with conservatives, who for reasons virtuous or otherwise have made it possible for young minorities to grow up seeing the first and second African-American Secretaries of State coming from that side of the political spectrum.

Yes, Western European counterparts do seem to struggle with the same lack of diversification when it comes to their foreign policy. I don’t want to excuse their failings, but the diversification of these countries has come quite rapidly over the last generation or so, whereas the United States has been 13% African-American for a long time. And now Hispanics are 13 or 14%. Our national security policy-making experts don’t reflect that diversity, either, with respect to Hispanics, African-Americans, or Asians.

Finally, there’s a larger systemic problem, of which attracting minorities is a subset. Insufficient numbers of our young people are drawn to careers in government service. People in federal service are aging. They are turning over quickly, and there isn’t a next generation coming behind them of sufficient quality and quantity. That’s the macro-problem. And there’s a lot we can do there: streamline the hiring process; pay more; reward people for performance; and shorten the incredibly long career path so that talent can rise faster. A whole set of obvious but by no means likely solutions.

When it comes to minorities, though, I think it’s going to take an even more focused and deliberate set of strategies. There’s sort of a top-down and bottom-up requirement at the same time. From the bottom-up, we have to build the pipeline, which begins at the college level, if not before, and must include graduate schools and aggressive recruiting and development of minority talent at institutions, agencies and universities.

Top down, the more role models we have who make a conscious effort to showcase the attractiveness of this kind of career, the better we’ll do. Once people achieve a degree of experience or stature, I frankly believe that it’s incumbent upon them to reach down and support the next generation and do so very deliberately. I think that progressives need to communicate compellingly that we are a body of people who celebrate, welcome, and see the strategic value of diversity—not because it’s some ideal, but because it’s in our long-term national interest. We need to communicate to minorities who are thinking about international affairs or national security as a possible career path that we value and embrace them.

Certainly, since I’ve left government, I’ve had more time to ponder this issue. On one hand, I get heartened when I spend time at places like Campus Progress and see that the room looks far more diverse at the college level than it does at the assistant secretary level or beyond, but it’s still not all that it could be. And I’m wondering what message we’re sending to young people.

My impression is that minorities and African-Americans in particular who are drawn to public policy are more likely to be drawn to domestic issues than foreign issues. I myself was. Growing up as a minority in America, you have to be almost brain-dead not to feel there’s a huge amount of work that remains to be done in terms of reducing socio-economic disparities, poverty and inequality here at home. We still have a system of rules and norms that have not produced equality. If you are a minority and that doesn’t bother the hell out of you, and make you want to do something, then I don’t think you’re playing with a full deck.

I personally feel very deeply that the walls between domestic and foreign policy are crumbling before our eyes. Whenever you talk about competitiveness or workforce development or security or the environment, you cannot logically assume a firewall between the national and international. Having said that, I think unless and until more people have the opportunity to be exposed to the world beyond their own, whether African-American or Hispanic or white, they are likely to stay with what they know. So we need to expose people to the field.

I don’t have empirical data to back it up, but there does seem to be a tendency on the part of many African-Americans to find themselves drawn to or otherwise engaged in African issues. Is that because that’s what interests them? Is that because somehow they were urged in that direction? I don’t know. Probably both. But in my case, it was as accidental as my getting into the field in the first place. I was offered the opportunity to work on these issues at a more senior level at the NSC, and I developed a passion for Africa. But I have always been interested in a wide range of security issues. Now, I spend a good deal of my time on such subjects as proliferation, development, terrorism, and dealing with weak and fragile states. I think it’s crucially important that, as a nation, we harness the skills and insights and the abilities of African-Americans and other minorities across the full spectrum of our foreign policy-making. We ought to be experts on China, and the Middle East, and Europe, and everywhere. It’s great for African-Americans to care about and wanting to contribute on Africa policy, but we ought to contribute to the full range of national security policy, and we ought to be encouraged to do so.