Janice Underwood became Virginia’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer in 2019. She was the first person in the nation to hold a state Cabinet-level position focusing on these issues. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown
In the months after a blackface scandal threatened his governorship, Gov. Ralph Northam announced that he would appoint a chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer who would report directly to him — the first Cabinet-level position of its kind in any state in the nation. In September 2019, Janice Underwood took on the challenge.
A longtime educator who taught in Hampton’s public schools before leading Old Dominion University’s Teacher in Residence program and then serving as ODU’s director of diversity initiatives, Underwood has led the creation of the strategic One Virginia Plan to address systemic racism and inequity throughout state government and create more inclusive practices. She also leads the COVID-19 health equity task force for the state and has participated in high-level discussions at Virginia Military Institute, which is undergoing a reckoning with what some Black cadets have called a “relentlessly racist” culture.
Although her position was born during political turmoil, Underwood says that far from being “just the window dressing,” she is engaged in “institutionalizing equity so that it can be deeply embedded — to confront the inequity that’s also deeply embedded.”
