http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,100423,00.html
Friday, Feb. 23, 2001
How the EPA Was Made to Clean Up Its Own Stain Racism
By Jack White
Inside Marsha Coleman-Adebayo there's a streak of Rosa Parks.
Certainly, her decade-long struggle to clean up the racially toxic
atmosphere at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could make history.
Thanks to her refusal to accept second-class treatment at the EPA,
Congress will soon debate the first new civil rights law of the 21st
century. NOFEAR the Notification and Federal Employee
Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2001 would make federal
agencies more accountable when they are found guilty of
discriminating against their employees or trying to silence
whistleblowers. It would make them more accountable by requiring them
to pay the costs of discrimination and retaliation cases they lose
out of their own budgets instead of a government-wide slush fund.
Its original cosponsors are one of the more unlikely political odd
couples ever seen in Congress: ultra-conservative Wisconsin
Republican James Sensenbrenner and hyper-liberal Texas Democrat
Shiela Jackson-Lee. Though they rarely agree on anything,
Sensenbrenner and Jackson-Lee say Coleman-Adebayo's testimony at a
congressional hearing last fall brought them together on the need for
the law. Her story, says Sensenbrenner, made it abundantly clear that
new laws "with teeth in them" were required to make the EPA clean up its act.
For Coleman-Adebayo, an MIT-trained political scientist who had held
a string of impressive jobs at the United Nations and World Wildlife
Fund, her first two years at the EPA during the administration of
Bush the Elder were like laboring on a "21st-century plantation."
During her earliest days on the job, "I got a very clear sense that I
wasn't welcome," she recalls. Just how unwelcome became clear two
years later on the eve of Bill Clinton's inaugural. A senior EPA
executive told her that she could attend a routine staff meeting only
because "we consider you an honorary white man."
Racial pollution is allowed to fester
The gibe came as a terrible shock. "I was humiliated. I was
embarrassed," she says, still fuming about the incident. "I didn't go
to the EPA to be the butt of racially insensitive remarks." But she
thought those days were over when President Clinton in early 1993
selected Carol Browner, a noted liberal who had worked as an aide to
Al Gore, as the EPA's new administrator. "I was pleased to see a
woman with a reputation for being sensitive to civil rights issues
become administrator," says Coleman-Adebayo, 48. "I thought she would
start a dialogue about the abuses that were occurring inside the
agency and try to correct them."
That was not to be. Instead of cleaning up the agency's racial
pollution, says Coleman-Adebayo, Browner allowed it to fester. "She
wasn't at all sympathetic to complaints about civil rights abuses,"
says Coleman-Adebayo. "We were treated like Negroes, to use a polite
term. We were put in our place." In Coleman-Adebayo's case, that
meant that even though her work as one of the EPA's representatives
to the United Nations conference on women held in Beijing in 1995 won
praise from Hillary Clinton and Browner herself, she got neither a
raise nor a promised promotion.
After learning that she had been the only person on the otherwise
all-white professional staff of the Office of International Affairs
who did not receive an outstanding performance evaluation or annual
bonus, Coleman-Adebayo filed a discrimination complaint with the
EPA's office of civil rights. "And that," says Coleman-Adebayo, "is
when the ceiling fell down on my head."
In short order, she says, her fulfilling work with the women's
conference was taken away. Her white supervisor told her in an annual
performance evaluation that "people just consider you to be uppity."
Then she was appointed executive secretary of a bilateral commission
working group on environmental issues co-chaired by Vice President
Gore and South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, but not given the resources she
needed to fulfill her duties. "The harassment really intensified,"
says Coleman-Adebayo. "We couldn't get any funding for projects. I
couldn't get permission to travel to South Africa to meet with my
counterparts there. It got so bad that the South African government
offered to send me a plane ticket because they needed me to be at
some meetings."
A large financial settlement
But for all the obstacles put in her way, Coleman-Adebayo couldn't
believe that a top official of an administration hailed for its
sensitivity to blacks would countenance such misconduct. Her lawyer
sent Browner a letter in March 1997, declaring that Coleman-Adebayo
thought that Browner was being "deliberately kept out of the loop"
about the "crude and ham-fisted" treatment she was receiving from a
network of "good old boys" who dominated the agency's middle
management. She got back a letter from Browner's chief of staff
saying that since Coleman-Adebayo's complaint was under
investigation, Browner wouldn't discuss it. Frustrated,
Coleman-Adebayo went to court. Last summer a jury in Washington found
the EPA guilty of discriminating against her and awarded her $600,000
in damages (since reduced by the judge to $300,000).
A considerable victory. But Coleman-Adebayo's real triumph was in
casting a spotlight on the bigotry that had festered inside many
government departments under both Republicans and Democrats. For all
Clinton's public embrace of black concerns, his administration did
not work more effectively to clean up the mess than its do-nothing predecessor.
And as word of Coleman-Adebayo's case spread, scores of EPA workers
came forward with tales of mistreatment at the hands of white
supervisors. Among them was Anita Nickens, an EPA environmental
specialist who tearfully described how, at a 1993 EPA event at which
she was the only black employee present, she was ordered to clean up
a toilet in anticipation of Browner's arrival. To make matters worse,
Nickens recalled, her white supervisor later bragged about it to
others. An association of 150 aggrieved employees is exploring filing
a class-action discrimination suit against the EPA similar to those
that have already been aimed at the FBI, Secret Service, Agriculture
Department and other agencies.
At last October's congressional hearing, Browner, at times appearing
close to tears, boasted that during her tenure minority
representation in EPA's most senior ranks had more than tripled. But
she could not explain why the EPA managers who discriminated against
Coleman-Adebayo were still on the job and in some cases had even been promoted.
If the new Bush regime is serious about reaching out to blacks, it
should join Sensenbrenner and Jackson-Lee to push for NOFEAR's
enactment. The administration took a good first step earlier this
month when the new EPA leader, former New Jersey governor Christie
Todd Whitman, honored Browner's pledge that the EPA would not fight
the verdict in Coleman-Adebayo's lawsuit.
That's one way of ensuring that no one ever has to go through an
ordeal like hers again.
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