Overlooked Voices: The Struggle for Inclusion of Black Women in the Joe Biden Administration.

While it was no new refrain, the first thing the White House discovered was that there is a clear perception, that a reverberating irony exists — the overlooked value of U.S. born Black women by the Biden administration. Whether it is a deliberate overlooking or an accident, this has not gone unnoticed. It seems that they have been asked to take a back seat in the administration’s senior management roles across the government. As a result, Black women’s communities who have witnessed these women’s professional abuse, disrespect, and stress are becoming more willing to organize and abandon re-election of an administration that has abandoned the women who symbolize success and are the backbone of economic sustainability in their communities.

It was telling to read countless articles from Southeast Asian Indian media outlets when Gautam Raghavan was tapped to direct the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Apparently, the word was out that this was their moment. A walk-through from the White House itself down to the lowest ranking cabinet agency, the Small Business Administration (SBA), suggests some veracity to the notion and an even more concerning and noticeable trend. It seems that PPO has adopted a culture of excluding U.S. born Black women from promotion. Indian Americans head both PPO and Office of Personnel Management and now senior management throughout the government reflects, what appears to be the implementation of an unspoken caste system. Only people of a certain phenotype need apply for or expect promotion.

An anonymous source close to PPO revealed that “highly qualified U.S. Black women candidates for appointments and promotion have been routinely overlooked and disqualified by the PPO Director Gautam Raghavan under various guises and subjective interpretations.” When Raghavan was Deputy Director of PPO, the fact that Shalanda Young was not a shoo-in to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) after Neera Tanden’s withdrawal, was the first indication that there was a PPO problem for U.S. born Black Women. One needn’t draw the obvious racial implications. The reasonings have been ludicrous and offensive such as the case with Kemba Walden — supposedly her debt ratio made her susceptible to blackmail (a notion debunked by the very Senate committees that would have confirmed her).

To be clear, these types of scenarios are playing out all over the Biden Administration executive branches. For example, the Department of Labor ironically is a very light on Black women in leadership. The State Department and the Department of Treasury have been replete in their advancement of Black women. Perhaps all these dynamics are coincidental and perhaps watching every ethnic and minority group in America with the exception of Black women make significant senior level management advancement in the Biden administration is also coincidental.

Yet, given Gautum Raghavan’s background on issues impacting both the LGBT and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, one might be able to ascribe the lack of inclusion of Black women as an oversight or even an overcompensation for the class of people where his expertise lies. However, given he also is touted as a workplace nondiscrimination advocate, it is challenging to understand the current situation as coincidence. He should be so keenly aware of the dynamics that it would cease to exist. Yet, they persist.

For example, a snapshot of the SBA is a perfect microcosm of this intra-agency state of play. SBA headquarters logistics and the agency leadership tell a story of white male dominance. Former SBA employees tell of a front office where men have an in-suite restroom, but women must leave the front office to use the restroom — in 2023. While sources cite a leadership team with a personnel practice complaint history, Connecticut based Counselor to the Administrator, Dan Krupnik and Chief of Staff, Arthur Plews, are the key agency leaders.

Much like at the White House, the Acting Ombudsman, a Black woman Mina Wales was stepped over and a white woman was given the post. Prior to that, Krupnik and Plews would not give a Black woman a title change while promoting white and Hispanic women. She left the SBA.

In fact, sources who recently left SBA and in their words “have nothing to lose now” stated that one Black woman who was thought to be white revealed to Krupnik that indeed she was Black only to be verbally assaulted about “not looking Black” and challenged to show pictures of her mother. Since then, she has been marginalized in her role amidst comments by Latino employees citing a “Hispanic mob ruling of SBA”. They further went on to say that “no one dares report anything to anyone because there seems to be a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy” promoting the understanding and belief that to report racial discrimination, be it in the office dynamics or program implementation, is disloyalty to the Administrator and to the President.