Driving Ms. Browner

Over the past eight years Environmental Protection Agency director Carol Browner has visited Chicago more than a dozen times. Each time she comes to the Windy City, Browner has requested that Ronald Harris, an EPA staffer at the Region 5 headquarters, serve as her driver and gofer. At first Harris felt honored. But then he began to wonder if he wasn't being singled out for malign reasons. Harris is black.

When confronted by these problems, Carol Browner shrugged as if to say what's the big deal? "I look forward to going to Chicago so that Mr. Harris can drive me," Browner testified at an October 4 hearing before the House Committee on Science, which was investigating charges of whistleblower abuse inside the federal government. The big deal is that racism appears to be running rampant throughout Browner's agency and she has done nothing to stem it. For decades, the Departments of Interior and Agriculture have been known to be sinkholes of racism and sexism. A recent report by Blacks in Government described Bruce Babbitt's Interior Department as "the whitest of all federal agencies." In a recent case, a staffer at Interior confronted her manager after learning from a colleague that he had called her "a Mississippi nigger." The woman asked if he had indeed made this slur and the manager replied, "Would it make you feel better if I called you a `good Mississippi nigger?'"

The USDA is currently facing seven class action suits alleging systemic racism in its agencies. One case cites the experience of a Hispanic female recruiter. The woman had been hired precisely to recruit more minorities into the lily-white Forest Service. She did her job so well that a Forest Service supervisor erupted at her, screaming: "Don't send me any more cunts, niggers, or spics!" These cases are appalling. But civil rights organizers in DC say that the situation inside the EPA may be worse, and that conditions there have deteriorated since the election of Clinton in 1992.

Take the case of Anita Nickens, who works as a mid-level staffer at the EPA's American Indian Environmental Office. In 1993, she was one of six EPA employees on a staff retreat at a lodge on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in North Carolina. She was the only black in the group. Just prior to Carol Browner's arrival at the lodge, a supervisor instructed Nickens to go and scrub the toilet. "Director Browner does not use the toilet behind anyone else," Nickens was told.

Nickens said she was repulsed by the order, but did the job because she feared retaliation. Later she overheard her supervisor bragging about this humiliating order to others. "I went back into my room, locked myself in and cried," Nickens says. "I was so embarrassed and blamed myself for giving in to that request. I feel like I let down other black women." When Nickens filed a complaint, she was punished by the agency.

In August, a US District Court awarded Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo $600,000 in a suit brought against the EPA. The court ruled that Coleman-Adebayo had been subjected to racial discrimination and a hostile work environment. Coleman-Adebayo, an EPA program director, says that she was routinely passed over for promotion at the EPA despite holding a doctoral degree. She says a colleague told her that she didn't get promoted because she was "uppity." Coleman-Adebayo recounted a scene that she says is all-too-familiar for blacks inside the EPA. "I was the only black person at a staff meeting and one of the others in the room called me 'an honorary white male,'" Coleman-Adebayo said.

Coleman-Adebayo noted that while African-Americans represent only 17% of the EPA workforce, they represent 57% of those fired by the agency. "The EPA is a 21st Century plantation," Coleman-Adebayo said. "Promising careers have been destroyed and other colleagues have suffered stress-related illnesses and perhaps even early death, like Lilian Peasant [an EPA staffer who was the victim of abuse and harassment]. Many blacks have seen their lives compromised and aspirations crushed."

In testimony before the House Science Committee, Coleman-Adebayo described how racism at the highest levels of EPA has impeded the agency's willingness to help African nations address toxic waste problems and other issues. "Because Ms. Browner fails to act, US foreign policy suffers, as well. For example, on a trip to South Africa during a Gore/Mbeki commission meeting [a meeting chaired by Vice President Al Gore and South African President Thabo Mbeki], the Assistant EPA Administrator for International Activities referred to Peter Mokaba, then Deputy Minister of the Environment in South Africa and a hero in the struggle for freedom in that country as a 'necklacer'--that is a murderer--while talking about him with Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson. Mr. Mokaba has never been accused, much less convicted of any such crime! But, the EPA officials' libelous acts and prejudices are allowed to taint the fabric of US international environmental policy.

"In another example of gross insensitivity, South Africa requested the EPA's assistance on behalf of a community which had been poisoned by Vanadium. We had agreed to help. When I attempted to meet our obligations, I was officially reprimanded, refused travel requests, and removed from the position. I was replaced by a white male with no background in Africa. As with other African-Americans, I was hindered by managers from providing my expertise to address international environmental issues."

These complaints appear to be the rule, not the exception, at the EPA--an agency that is charged with fighting environmental racism. In September more than 150 black EPA employees filed a class action suit against Browner's agency, alleging widespread bias, discrimination, and retaliatory practices. The suit catalogues an appalling record of arbitrary performance reviews, crackdowns by supervisors on whistleblowers, blacks being passed over for promotion, denied raises, and punished for complaining about environmental and workplace hazards. The suit is backed by the NAACP. "The careers of an excessive number of black scientists and other minority employees at the EPA have been unjustly devastated by the ongoing and rampant racism occurring throughout the agency," said Leroy Warren, head of the NAACP's federal sector task force. "In too many instances within the EPA, Jim Crow Jr. appears to be using mercenaries to control and punish racial minorities, women, and decent white men."

The suit details a number of other cases of discrimination. A black female staffer in the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics said that after she took her complaints to the internal union she suffered lower performance ratings and other reprisals. She says that after filing a complaint she received a telephone call from her second-line supervisor who called her "a black bitch." A former black attorney with the EPA, Lashanda Holloway, was paid $30,000 less per year than white lawyers with similar experience and credentials. Dana Hawkins, a black staffer in the EPA's Atlanta office, claims that her supervisor illegally used her Social Security number to acquire information about her personal life and then used it to harass her.

The Atlanta office has been plagued by racial problems. Most recently, the Department of Labor found the EPA retaliated against Dr. Rose Russo for cooperating with an investigation into whistleblower harassment at the agency. The EPA reassigned Dr. Russo from her position as lab director at the Georgia regional office effective November 5, 2000--a position she had held for 16 years--to a position handling grants at EPA headquarters. In the October 3 decision, the Department of Labor directed the EPA to cancel the transfer because it was based on retaliation. "We've made these complaints known to Ms. Browner, but they have been ignored," said Leroy Warren. Warren described Browner and her top staffers as being "arrogant," "remote," and unwilling to punish racists inside the agency. As a result, the NAACP has asked Browner to resign.

Browner's EPA has also turned a blind eye to discrimination and racist conduct by some of its favored contractors. A notorious example is the case of the Foster/Wheeler company, a New Jersey-based construction firm that has enjoyed numerous EPA contracts despite persistent complaints of sexual harassment and systemic racism inside the company. In January, a federal court levied a $1.3 million judgment against Foster/Wheeler in a class action suit brought by 100 black employees working out of the company's Chicago office.

This August another Foster/Wheeler employee, Terrence Townsend, filed suit against the firm, alleging racial discrimination at an EPA contract site in Stratford, Connecticut. Townsend says that black employees of Foster/Wheeler are "given heavier workloads, more undesirable assignments, and paid far less than our white counterparts." After Townsend complained to company officials about these discriminatory practices, a white co-worker handed him a hangman's noose and told him, "This noose is for you if you get out of hand." Townsend also said he was forced to use a portable toilet at the EPA site which was covered with Ku Klux Klan graffiti. Townsend said he interpreted the noose and the KKK graffiti as warnings that he would suffer personal injury if he stayed with the company. He soon quit and now works as a technical specialist at GZA GeoEnvironmental in Newton, Massachusetts. "Working at that site put a lot of stress on me," Townsend says. "It's hard to believe that this kind of discrimination still happens, especially on a government-contracted site."