Parchayi

One of the first pieces of advice I received from a mentor in the department was to withhold my identity as a Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow with my Foreign Service Officer (FSO) colleagues in the workplace. With incredible honesty and vulnerability, my mentor recounted the many microaggressions, assumptions, and rejections she braved during her first overseas posting – incidents which she felt were exacerbated by other colleagues’ assumptions about her status as a fellow. As one of the few womxn of color at post, situated in a historically “pale, male, and yale” institution, she already experienced racism on the basis of her color, gender, and at the intersection of both identities: Her white colleagues would routinely exclude her from their cliques. They mistook her for another womxn of color in the office or for being a Foreign Service National. Senior leadership ignored her presence during roundtable introductions. Colleagues advised her to smile more lest her appearanc