The Buttigieg Era, African-Americans, and Accountability, Part II
[This column is the second in a series examining the experiences of African-Americans with the City of South Bend during the Mayor Buttigieg era. The first can be found here. The third is here.]
I. The Buttigieg’s Administration’s Record of Hiring African American Employees
What is the record of the Buttigieg administration in recruiting and hiring African-Americans to city employment? And how does this record compare with the diversity of South Bend?
As a city, more than one out of every four citizens in South Bend identifies as African-American; in our public schools, African-American students outnumber Caucasian students substantially.
Despite the diversity of our community, there has been little attention focused on the underrepresentation of African-Americans in city employment. An exception has been the South Bend Police Department; the attrition of 14 out of 29 African-American officers from the force during the Buttigieg era became national news. Yet our local and national media has missed signs that Mayor Buttigieg and his team profoundly underrepresented African-Americans in prior years’ hiring to the Police Department, and that indeed, the Buttigieg administration has performed poorly in all but a few city departments to recruit and hire African-American staff, and particularly to hire African-American staff to positions that pay above $43,000 annually.
One important trend concerns new hires. In the most recent year for which Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data is available, July 1, 2016 until June 30, 2017, the City of South Bend made 114 new hires to permanent, full time employment. Only 16 of these hires identified as African-American, or 14% of the total. Over 40% of these new African-American hires were employed in “Sewage and Sanitation” departments.
African-American employees hired to South Bend “Sewage and Sanitation” sectors outnumbered those hired to South Bend Police, Fire, Housing, and Mayoral offices, despite the fact that these latter are collectively far larger and had many more openings. Only one African-American employee in the “Sewage and Sanitation” sectors made over $43,000 annually, out of twenty-eight employees who did.
For remaining departments city-wide, including Police (2 out of 26), Fire (1 out of 13), the Mayor’s Office and associated administration (1 out of 16), and Housing (0 out of 7), African-Americans comprised fewer than one out of every ten new hires.
Another trend concerns diversity in leadership positions. African-American leadership in highest-paid administration, as documented by the 2017 EEOC report, was also low. African-Americans numbered just five of the forty-four, or 11%, of “Officials/Administrators” in this EEOC report who earned over $43,000 annually. This is an improvement from the 9% registered in this category in 2015, but still a decline from 12%, or eight out of sixty-five, which African-Americans comprised in this same group in 2009, during the Mayor Luecke administration.
The EEOC data does not record the diversity of appointed officials in department head or “Cabinet-level” positions. Yet it appears that there is little diversity in this group as well, per what the EEOC terms “visual observation” of those listed by the City of South Bend as department heads from 2013 to the present day. A recent report by the non-profit Democracy in Color found that Mayor Buttigieg hired very few African-Americans to department head positions. In order to represent this data and the heavy turnover of Buttigieg department heads over eight years, the graph below presents the months served by department heads according to race.
A third trend concerns the lack of diversity in leadership and hiring in Mayor Buttigieg’s first term. There were warning signs that lack of representation in leadership was associated with a lack of diversity in city hiring in the two prior EEOC reports of the Buttigieg administration. Following the demotion by Mayor Buttigieg of Darryl Boykins, the city’s first African American police chief, from July 1, 2012 until June 30, 2013, the Police Department hired only two African-Americans out of twenty-one full time hires. From July 1, 2014 until June 30, 2015, the Police Department numbered one African-American among its seventeen full-time hires.
Total new hires to city employment documented in the 2013 and 2015 EEOC reports number 144, and twenty-one of these identified as African-American, or 14%. More than half, or twelve, were hired by Sewer and Sanitation, Park, and Street departments. However, according to the 2015 EEOC report, only one African-American was among the sixty employees who earned above $43,000 annually in these departments.
For 2013 and 2015, remaining city departments hired African-Americans to new full time employment at a 9% rate. In 2015 African-American employment in the highest salary levels remained low: only 7% of the over 600 city employees earning above $43,000 annually identified as African-American. This was a decline from the 9% that African-Americans represented in the same category in the 2009 EEOC report, which documented the Luecke administration.
Thus for the three EEOC reports currently available as the hiring records of the Buttigieg administration, 2013, 2015, and 2017, hiring of African-Americans to full-time positions in most departments has been at a less than 10% rate, a dramatic under-representation relative to the proportion of African-Americans in the South Bend community, who comprise over 26% of the city’s population, and are the largest racial demographic in South Bend schools. Further, African-American representation at higher levels of pay, and among “Officials/Administrators” in higher levels of pay, has declined in the Buttigieg era, according to EEOC data, from the prior administration. Most likely, such lack of representation in leadership and among staff has contributed in a variety of ways to Mayor Buttigieg’s policies as Mayor, especially to the failures of the Buttigieg administration to contract with African-American Owned business.
“With Mayor Pete, like what we see with a lot of white liberals, is a strong grasp of liberal…or even racial justice rhetoric….when we talk about the on-the-ground experiences of black folks in South Bend, there has been a reluctance and even a refusal to actually implement racial justice.”- Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, LA Chapter, following a July 2019 workshop in South Bend.
II. The Buttigieg Administration’s Rhetoric and Reporting on Diversity
Why do many South Bend citizens, and now citizens nationwide, remain unaware of these declines and failures in representation in our city? Why do some believe the Buttigieg administration is a model of diversity? A key culprit can be found in the strategic messaging of Mayor Buttigieg during the first year of his second term: 2016.
Following frequent criticism of his administration in his first term due to its lack of diversity, in 2016 the Buttigieg administration made important changes. It hired Mrs. Christina Brooks to the newly created position of City Officer for Diversity and Inclusion, and, months following her hire, released a report of dozens of pages on Diversity and Inclusion in the City of South Bend.
This report was highly anticipated in South Bend as reporters had seized on the lack of representation of South Bend’s diversity among the department heads of the Buttigieg era. In particular, the investigative reporting of Alexis Rivas Gray, a Columbia-trained journalist, exposed the underrepresentation of women and minorities among department heads, and the lack of resources dedicated to diversity and inclusion by the City of South Bend. [Unfortunately, due to the closure of her local television station, I am not able to locate her reports online.]
2016 generated a number of official statements by the Mayor and mayoral staff about diversity. While some had hoped they would shed light on the City of South Bend’s hiring, purchasing, and leadership, these statements typically communicated very strategic and limited messaging. Below, four official statements are analyzed: the 2016 State of the City address by the Mayor, the 2016 Diversity and Inclusion Report (DI Report), Mayor Buttigieg’s May 2016 televised interview with Rivas Gray on diversity (Gray interview), and Mrs. Christina Brooks’ op-ed in the South Bend Tribune. These four communications established consistent, and troubling, patterns.
The first pattern is the emphatic use of only one or two specific statistics. In the State of the City and in Mrs. Brooks’ op-ed, only small groups of employees are described. In the State of the City, these groups are from the Mayor’s Office and from City Legal, amounting to less than a few dozen out of roughly a thousand city employees, and selected from among the smallest of the ten city departments.
Mrs. Brooks’ op-ed cited just two organizational cohorts: “Officials and Administrators” in the Mayor’s Office, and “direct reports” to the Mayor. None of these number more than 16 employees. As for those referred to as “direct reports”, this category lumps together 10 department heads, who supervise employees, set budgets, and oversee large operations, and six mayoral staff members who have few or no associated staff, are paid less, and operate small budgets. The diversity of the “direct reports” is almost entirely from this latter group of six. Among the 10 department heads, following the demotion of Chief Boykins, there were troubling signs by mid-2012 that diversity in departmental leadership dropped substantially, and maintained a low level, even though Mayor Buttigieg had many opportunities to hire and re-hire these leadership positions. Mrs. Brooks column did not communicate this.
A second pattern is the omission of statistics comparing the Buttigieg administration’s diversity to prior administrations. Mrs. Brooks’ op-ed omitted that minorities have declined from the prior administration in the specific “Officials and Administrators” category she referenced. There are no statistics in the State of the City address, the DI Report, the Gray interview, or Mrs. Brooks’ op-ed that chart the declines of African-American employees among all “Officials and Administrators” in the city, top paid employees, or any other category. The low or non-existent level of hiring of African-Americans to open positions in various city departments is not described.
A third pattern is the avoidance of common or best practice diversity reporting. It should be noted that “Staff of Color” and “Persons of Color”, phrases used in the DI Report, the Gray Interview, and in Mrs. Brooks’ Op-Ed, are not terms recommended by the lexicon of diversity terminology provided in the City of South Bend’s own DI Report (pages 10–14), which is sourced from the National Multicultural Institute. With these “catch-all” terms, the Buttigieg administration lumped together all who are not Caucasian. One therefore cannot determine, for example, the percentage of Hispanic leaders in city government, or African American leaders, and so forth, from reading the 58 pages of the City of South Bend DI Report, or from these other communications. Such non-reporting ignores recommended best practices and terminology in its own DI Report, as well as the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s stated intention “to analyze department hiring trends and turnover by department and demographics”. (31)
The DI Report further does not present employment demographics according to salary level, department, historical trends, or even in reference to other similar cities, even though this data is collected by the city and kept by the EEOC. The bi-annual Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) collections of this data were not made accessible to the South Bend public except by public records application, and are not advertised by the city as available. The Buttigieg administration did not share it with at least one inquiring reporter; a local journalist who asked for data contained in this EEOC report was referred by the Buttigieg administration to lesser, and very partial, documentation.
The sum total of published statistical data available on the diversity of City of South Bend employees in the DI Report, found on one page in its appendix, regards “Staff of Color”, and it communicates this data with a unique method. The data is filtered through a benchmark created by examining how many ‘persons of color’ have the educational background to qualify for a position’s description. In our area, the percentage of ‘qualified’ minority persons for these positions is far lower than the actual percentage of our community who identify as African American, Hispanic, etc. This is how the administration presents the entirety of its data on diversity. In this way it finds that for “Officials and Administrators” under-representation of minorities is statistically negligible. By lumping all salary groups together, all departments, and using a far lower ‘benchmark’, profound under-representation of African-American and Hispanics among Officials and Administrators in leadership is transformed into statistically negligible under-representation, barely exceeding the statistical margin of error. Mrs. Brooks’ op-ed cites this same ‘benchmark’.
In a subsequent communication to me, when asked, Mrs. Brooks could not identify another city that utilizes this particular statistic for benchmarking purposes.
Other metrics devised by the Diversity and Inclusion report over-emphasize Caucasians relative to South Bend’s population. For example, the report establishes benchmarks by comparison with eight other cities. Not noted in the report is that nearly all cities adopted as benchmarks, like Green Bay, WI, Cedar Rapids, IA, and Topeka, KS, look nothing like South Bend, being far more Caucasian and having far fewer African-Americans and Hispanics in their communities.
A fifth pattern is the accompaniment of these highly selective statistics with rhetoric suggesting the state of diversity in city leadership is strong. In the Gray Interview Mayor Buttigieg said he was proud of his “diverse department heads.” The State of the City, DI Report, and Mrs. Brooks’ Op-Ed all cite a McKinsey study stating that diverse organizations outperform homogenous organizations, with a possible implicit suggestion that South Bend’s administration is such an organization. Indeed, in the DI Report, the introduction of this study is prefaced with a note stating “South Bend is comparatively one of the best cities with fewer than 150,000 residents in the Midwest” (36) lending the impression that South Bend’s leadership is diverse. Such inferences, coupled with selective statistics, are highly misleading.
Because of the consistency and authority of the Buttigieg’s administration and its strategic messaging on diversity, most South Bend citizens I have spoken with have shared their impression that the leadership and city staff of South Bend are diverse. Exceptions to this portrayal have been rare, but notable; recently, former South Bend Mayor Roger Parent wrote in the South Bend Tribune that diversity in leadership appears to have dropped, not simply from the administration prior to Mayor Buttigieg, but from levels of representation achieved in the mid-1980s:
When my time as mayor ended Jan. 1, 1988, additional progress had been made and the city workforce better reflected the makeup of the city. Notably, there was an African American fire chief and African American director of human resources, plus three women department directors.
This contributed substantially to a decades-long period of very little divisiveness in South Bend. Today in 2019, the African American percentages in police and fire are below those of 1979 — given that the city’s African American population has increased from about 18% to around 24%. [sic] Furthermore, there’s only one African American department director who doubles as the city’s only woman department director.- Former South Bend Mayor Roger Parent
The rhetoric of Mayor Buttigieg and his administration in 2016 on diversity has little basis in the reality communicated by South Bend’s mandated reporting to the EEOC, and was uninformed by common and recommended practices in the field of diversity reporting. The few statistics and benchmarks communicated were not standard, the categories for presenting statistics utilized non-specific catch-all terms, and were delivered in a time when the diversity of city leaders was a mere fraction of South Bend’s diversity. Yet the messaging was, for a time, effective, in the sense that many South Bend citizens, and national media dependent on local reporting of the issue, were swayed to believe that the Buttigieg administration was diverse. Coupled with a lack of investigation into minority hiring, contracting, and departmental leadership, the perception has persisted to this day, with consequences for democracy, local and national, and most especially for African-American households in South Bend, who have yet to receive due consideration from our city government regarding transparency, representation and economic justice.
