I asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about this report on Tuesday of last week. This is a transcript of our exchange from the briefing:
Q Thanks, Robert. The Government Accountability Project recently released a 53-page report on racial discrimination at the World Bank. I'm curious if you've read it, do you plan to read it, if you're interested in it, and also if you've discussed a possible change of leadership at the World Bank with the President?
MR. GIBBS: I don't know the degree to which the report has been examined. I personally have not seen it, so I would hesitate to comment on it.
While this cautious approach is no surprise with Gibbs, I made sure to forward the report to his secretary and another White House employee who is in charge of African American media. It will be interesting to see how they respond or if any further action is taken.
A current African World Bank employee says, “there are repeated roadblocks to applying for positions, to being hired and retained, promoted, and treated fairly on the job.” Another female African American employee who has worked at headquarters and on World Bank mission says, “over the years I have had several Bank staff express to me the thought that perhaps Black Americans "are not interested" in working at the World Bank. Or that none are "qualified." But white Americans are always "more" qualified?”
GAP's International Program Director Bea Edwards says there are no incentives for World Bank managers to increase diversity. “Many private companies award bonuses, for example, to directors whose departments meet diversity targets. The bank does not – therefore it’s not surprising the figures don’t change.”
Some racial incidents have also plagued the bank. Most recently, someone spray painted a racial slur and a derogatory message “telling all foreigners to go home.” The fact that the World Bank is a very secure place, almost equal to the White House in my opinion, this could not have been done by just any random visitor. If the graffiti came from a World Bank employee, it confirms the testimony from current and former black employees who complained to me about decades of discrimination and intimidation.
The World Bank fired off an internal memo on Monday addressing this issue. Human resource managers Dorothy Berry and Hasan Tuluy wrote the memo. The note acknowledged the racially offensive graffiti was found in the legal department on the 6th Floor of the MC Building. “Such acts are hurtful to all of us and even frightening to some of our colleagues, and we deplore them,” the memo said regarding the graffiti.
A 2006 report entitled "SA Diversity and Inclusion issues" prepared for then World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz suggests, “The status of racial discrimination in the World Bank Group (MIGA/IFC/ICSID) is very bad. It is now more subtle and sophisticated."
The report written by Salomon Samen, an African staffer, was circulated to members of the World Bank Staff Association and reviewed by peers at the bank. A World Bank media spokesman said: “We do not look at diversity profiles within individual nationalities, and our racial equality program addresses all black staff. In the case of the United States, we have Americans from a variety of backgrounds, including many naturalized Americans from Africa. We have made substantial progress, but we are continually working to do more.”
Samen’s report also has a section of solutions and one title reads a “need for institutional mechanisms to reward or sanction perpetrators of discrimination.” This seemed to be a good suggestion regarding the graffiti incident. The 14-page report also says African Americans are marginalized within the bank and there is a lack of empowerment.
“You can find Black Americans at the Bank who actually work for sub-contractors, and thus do not really work for the bank,” a current African American World Bank employee told me in confidence. “They work in areas like food and janitorial services. There are some in Bank IT services. But other than that, almost all other Black Americans who are in the bank are temporary employees who work for temporary placement agencies. They are not truly Bank employees.” I found that many African American contract employees had to renew their jobs every month, creating a situation where they had no job security. Yolanda Young wrote a piece about law firm segregation that exposed these kind of unwritten policies at law firms. It is a very hard to complain about diversity when you don’t have real status as an employee with full benefits.
My conversation with the World Bank media contact revealed some angst over the current discrimination dilemma. As I asked my questions, the press officer was adamantly questioning what I would be writing and challenging the GAP report in a very personal way. While I could understand his passion over the diversity issue, there was a distinct impression that he was trying to tell me how to write the story. After I hung up, I thought working in the same office as this individual could be a conflict. If this is the same treatment other African Americans face regarding a conversation on diversity, it is not a good thing for the World Bank.
It seems adjustments to the system could be as Samen's report suggests, “education and training, particularly for managers, to generate an institutional culture that values diversity and fosters inclusion.”
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Racial discrimination: a World Bank problem
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