WHAT IS AFRICA TO ME? DILEMMAS OF TRANSNATIONAL ETHNICITY

...ambassador in Kenya during the Carter administration...

...This behavior deserves more critical attention than it has yet received...

...For peoples of African descent living in the Diaspora, the sources of their ethnicity are extrinsic and defensive in character, stemming from several centuries of territorial separation from Africa under the political-cultural hegemony of the white Christian civilization...

...government to drop its long-standing friendly posture toward the authoritarian South African regime...

...It is a commonplace that as American ethnic groups win power for themselves at home, they seek to use the power abroad...

...Afro-Americans (and by extension other blacks in the Diaspora) 433 gain much of their cultural understanding in contradistinction to the cultural dominance of whites...

...While claiming they wanted to retrieve their African heritage, the Afro-American settlers in Liberia refused any serious policy of re-Africanization...

...It is especially the obligation of intellectuals in globalized ethnic politics to sustain this critical attitude...

...The cost to the intellectual for meeting this obligation is no doubt heavy, often alienating, and always stressful...

...Leon Sullivan, to persuade leading multinational corporations to curb investments in South Africa...

...But the Black Muslims had very little success...

...A Gallup Poll for early 1977 revealed that only 39 percent of white Americans favor action against American firms operating in South Africa...

...With three blacks among its ten members, the commission, which 436 is funded by the Ford Foundation, conducted investigations in South Africa in 1979-80 and, in 1981, issued its fine report, South Africa: Time Running Out (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981...

...Garvey was the first to articulate a form of black ethnicity that addressed its basic flaws—its culturally reactive attributes and the complex of ambiguous and negative identities that inform it...

...It was front-page news when several leading members of the Irish American intelligentsia (including Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel P Moynihan) signed a petition critical of the IRA and especially of Irish American funds for the IRA...

...Other typical members of the black foreignpolicy cadre are—to mention only a few: Franklin Williams, president of the Phelps Stokes Fund and ambassador to Ghana during the Johnson administration...

...Furthermore, some 51 percent of Americans "would work closely with South Africa to maintain stability in southern Africa...

...In recent years, Andrew Young has been the premier figure within the Afro-American foreignpolicy establishment...

...In the ideological and political spheres, there has been a plethora of competing groups concerned with the international extension of black ethnicity—some believing in Marxist anti-imperialist strategies, others in something nearer to a capitalist strategy, and some believing that Afro-Americans, with the black world as a whole, should fashion international linkages exclusively panblack and thus antiwhite...

...doned...

...Though such policy leverage is new, the African-related concerns are not...

...Others prefer staying within the Christian missionary tradition, which the AfroAmerican middle-class churches have used to extend black ethnicity for nearly a century (for instance, the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches...

...It is this feature of the politics of globalized ethnicity that cries out for attention...

...It is, then, precisely this kind of difference between being African and being Afro-American (or Jamaican, Haitian, and so on) that has plagued endeavors at globalizing black ethnicity...

...While empathy with victims is part of a critical perspective, so is vigilance toward the politics of globalized ethnicity designed to redress their oppression...

...Agency for International Development who was an African Affairs lobbyist for the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa in the 1960s...

...We can only build secure Latin American societies on the basis of democracy, on the basis of economic justice, on the basis of human rights...

...Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, did so courageously during the tragic civil war in Nigeria...

...These policies, however, seldom gain more than marginal support among the larger American public...

...For most ethnic intellectuals, the critical mind-set is arrived at after much and often torturous effort, as can be seen in the case of the Arab American intellectual Edward Said, a professor at Columbia University...

...Much political skill and courage, and moral vigilance, are required to avert this...

...Some, for example, favor Islamic religious patterns as the best means of deepening ties with Africa's peoples...

...John Aubrey Davis, a political scientist at the City University of New York and the first Afro-American consultant to the State Department on African affairs...

...Similarly, there were numerous black separatists in the 1960s who often felt that African diplomats and students living in America should join in the black Americans' growing antipathy toward intimate social intercourse with whites...

...Though some persons in this new establishment employ activistic symbols in dealing with African affairs, for the most part these symbols are increasingly abanOther members of the black foreign-policy establishment include C. Sylvester Whitaker, a political scientist at Rutgers University and the major American expert on Nigeria...

...The junta is responsible for the disappearance, the torture, the death of tens of thousands of its own citizens...

...Black intellectuals must help unseat the runaway kleptocracy and authoritarian cruelty prevailing in many of the world's black-run regimes...

...The Afro-American press all but ignored these murders, and when it did mention them it pretended their cause lay with the colonial legacy or with current neoimperialist machinations— not with the character of the black African elites that govern Uganda...

...This attitude was, of course, a response to the influence of Communist regimes (Soviet Russia and Cuba) in southern Africa—an issue that most African governments consider secondary when compared to the racist-authoritarian practices of the South African government...

...All of this points up a perplexing problem...

...They were preceded by earlier attempts by Afro-Americans to convert their ethnicity into an international or transnational force for African advancement...

...The demise of the Black Muslims since 1976 graphically underlines this failure...

...But that is not easy to achieve...

...Hence the ethnicity of a Diaspora society, such as Afro-America, is described by the culturally ambiguous term "blackness...

...By now the cathartic pattern of globalizing black ethnicity—from Garvey to the Black Muslims—may have become a part of history and should be put to rest...

...It must be remarked that, in general, black intellectuals the world over—the U.S., the Caribbean, and Africa—have not yet accepted their burden of moral scrutiny...

...Ambivalent in form and precarious in meaning, black ethnicity must be perpetually retrieved—fought for and fabricated, as it were, from issue to issue, from event to event, and epoch to epoch...

...The peoples of Africa, on the other hand, have ethnicities whose sources are intrinsic and assertive in character...

...This was, in turn, difficult for antiwhite black activists to rationalize, forcing them into a recognition of the loneliness associated with their blackness...

...It no longer appears to be needed, though a combination of residual racism in America and the rigidity of white rule in South Africa could rekindle blackracialist activity...

...May 31, 1982...

...Leading figures in the Afro-American intelligentsia—among them W. E. B. DuBois, then a major figure in the NAACP—were so entrapped by the catharsis provided by the Liberian enterprise that they were unable to critically confront the Liberian government's sale of slaves to Spanish plantations along the West African coast, despite thorough League of Nations documentation.' It was, however, the Garvey movement whose style of globalizing black ethnicity first galvanized an active popular following in black America, touching the emotions of the average working-class and lower-class urban AfroAmerican, as well as those of many small-town ones...

...Nowhere in Africa was European imperialist rule culturally and socially important enough to negate the intrinsic strength of African ethnicities...

...But in general, black intellectuals must cease hanging on to what Carlos Fuentes calls the catharsis of "simplistic nationalistic [ethnic or racial] sentiments," while black power elites squander national resources, squash political opposition, and trample human rights underfoot...

...Constance Hilliard, a Harvard-trained Arabist who heads the African section of the Senate Republican Foreign Policy Staff...

...Millions of dollars See I. K. Sundiata, Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, 1929-1936 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979...

...Though failing to institutionalize a global form of black ethnicity, the Garvey movement did pass on to black America a ritualistic approach to transnational issues...

...Clyde Ferguson, professor at Harvard Law School and a former ambassador to Uganda...

...Their cultural and societal fiber derives from thousands of years of fierce institutional continuity...

...As it happened, few African diplomats and students seriously cared to uphold this attitude...

...Violated and brutalized peoples like the Irish, Jews, Armenians, and Afro-Americans have a natural tendency to believe that a higher morality surrounds their causes...

...Herschel' Challenor, a political scientist now with UNESCO who formerly directed the research staff of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on African Affairs...

...Instead, the Afro-American settlers built an authoritarian modern state over and against Liberia's indigenous African tribes...

...The thousands of lives that IRA arms—partly funded by middle-class Irish Americans—snuff out in Northern Ireland and Israel's heavy-handed governance of the West Bank Palestinians are matters that American ethnic groups can ignore only at a high moral cost...

...Among Afro-Americans, different religious, cultural, ideological, and political strategies have competed for primacy...

...During the 19th and 20th centuries, many endeavors to mobilize black ethnicity in the United States into a transnational movement were of both types...

...Thus while Africans fully resented colonial racism, the new African states are little affected by this racist legacy and much more by the memory of ancient bonds and conflicts between tribal or ethnic groups...

...Examples of such Jewish Americans are reported daily in the obituary columns, as, for example, the report in the Boston Globe (May 2, 1977) on the death of Harry Levine, 81, a plastics manufacturer-inventor who in his adult years was active in Jewish agencies that sustain Israel...

...Edward Said, "The Arabs Should Face Their Real Priorities," New York Times, July 21, 1981...

...Insofar as black ethnicity shows little capacity to stimulate the flow of resources in behalf of long-run goals, leaders who attempt to mobilize blacks at the transnational level fall into two groups: (1) true believers in the global efficacy of black ethnicity, despite the contrary evidence of history...

...An Ibo in Nigeria is culturally definable, regardless of the manipulations of white colonialists...

...A Foreign Policy Association poll, also in early 1977, found that only 10 percent of Americans favored breaking off relations with South Africa "if its racist practices persisted unchanged...

...Ever since the 19th century, numerous efforts have been made by AfroAmericans to forge a positive ethnic awareness and, through this, to generate transnational influence in favor of the African peoples...

...Andrew Young, while not always deft in his diplomacy, kept articulating this concern, much to his credit...

...Thus both in America and elsewhere in the black Diaspora—Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Brazil, and so on—it is difficult to translate black ethnicity into a present-day principle of sacrifice, altruism, and group tenacity in behalf of long-range goals...

...This legacy persists...

...The Afro-American intellectual in particular must cease hindering this task by an unsophisticated attachment to the simplistic sentiments of globalized ethnicity...

...It's the only way we can exist as real [mature] nations.' In short, a critical stance demands that ethnic intellectuals insist that the moral requisites of a just world order not be sacrificed to an ethnic group's bid to redress brutalities of the past...

...This goal requires that the recurrent pressures for a black-separatist or black-racialist mode of mobilizing Afro-Americans around African concerns be contained...

...When American ethnic groups project upon the stage of world politics the angst and bitterness associated with their past victimization, the tactics they employ and the solutions they propound generate their own problems...

...W. T. LeMelle, a Ford Foundation aid officer in Africa and the U.S...

...435 underwrite this process...

...Meanwhile new modes of articulating Afro-American concerns with African affairs have evolved, particularly those associated with the black foreign-policy establishment...

...The reason, partly, is still the persistence of racist values that, not surprisingly, limit the capacity of the U.S...

...Each generation of American blacks must ask itself again and again: What is blackness...

...The reasons for this, if not good ones, were at least understandable...

...Most attempts to do so fail, however much they succeed in giving some Afro-Americans emotional relief from the cultural flaws that characterize the black Diaspora...

...Equally critical attention ought to be paid to the extent to which American ethnic groups back policies that create political and social dislocation in societies such as Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Cyprus, without much sensitivity to the human consequences...

...He initiated new foreign-policy postures for the United States in crisis areas in Southern Africa—Namibia, South Africa, Angola, and Rhodesia (now independent Zimbabwe...

...The most prominent were the Liberian settlers' movement and the Gar434 vey movement, officially called the Universal Negro Improvement Association...

...Many American ethnic groups have used their newly acquired political influence to shape foreign policies related to their ethnic homeland, and Afro-Americans are following this path...

...This state was reinforced by a fitful bourgeois pattern of social exclusion...

...There are precious few instances of black intellectuals confronting the perversions of newly acquired 6 Quoted in Anthony Lewis, "Which Side Are We On...

...This is what I mean by "a Jewish type of ethnicity...

...Randall Robinson, a Harvard-trained lawyer who directs TransAfrica, the only organized lobby among Afro-Americans concerned with African affairs...

...And with equal fervor he castigated the light- and brown-skinned minority that dominated the Afro-American middle class and the artisan working class, lambasting their hair because of its likeness to the straight hair of whites, ridiculing their skin color because it was not black enough...

...Yet there remain deficiencies in the posture of Afro-American leaders concerned with Africa— ethical deficiencies...

...Thus while the new black foreign-policy establishment has been able to influence Amer437 ican policies in Africa—especially in aiding the independence of Zimbabwe and facilitating action toward independence for Namibia— there remain policy areas beyond the reach of the black foreign-policy establishment...

...Or, in the pathetic words of Countee Cullen, a leading poet in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s: One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me?' Afro-American ethnicity is perpetually precarious in content and meaning, and this leads to a gnawing loneliness that stimulates uses of ethnicity that are often excessively cathartic...

...American ethnic groups sometimes insist upon policies toward the "homeland" that risk jeopardizing genuine American interests, as well as genuine world interests—especially the goals of peace and justice...

...The Liberian settlement movement, which had begun before the Civil War, was riddled with contradictions...

...439 tic sentiments...

...power by black rulers...

...Liberian slave-dealing produced a similar moral and intellectual crisis in the years between the two world wars...

...The same is true for the activity of a few Jewish American intellectuals—such as Herbert Kelman at Harvard University—who seek discourse with liberal Arab and Palestinian intellectuals...

...chairman of the New England Zionist Youth Commission...

...It is as essentially cathartic in content today as it was in Garvey's era, bereft of any serious capacity to forge what might be called "a Jewish type of ethnicity...

...catharsis associated with the Muslims' doctrine of antiwhite separatism—a doctrine that has its origins in the Afro-American's experience with white racism and derives its presentday meaning from this historical experience...

...Moreover, whenever linkages between Afro-Americans and Africans do evolve they seem peculiarly fitful...

...But who else is there to shoulder it...

...A typical member of this establishment is Franklin Thomas, the first black president of the Ford Foundation and chairman of the first national (private) commission on American policy on South Africa...

...This has been devastatingly so for Afro-Americans...

...Vast financial, managerial, and technical skills of American Jews have been transported to Israel, along with massive American government aid...

...In reality, people are victims because they are powerless, and though the reversal of their powerlessness is desirable, there is no guarantee whatever that newly acquired power in the hands of history's victims—the Irish, Jews, Palestinians, blacks, Kurds, etc.—will be informed by a higher morality...

...Contradictions associated with globalizing black American ethnicity are as numerous as the competing strategies...

...These attempts were galvanized by innumerable repressive and traumatic experiences—the bondage of blacks in the plantation South, the violent restrictions upon Afro-American citizenship following the failure of Reconstruction, the neurotic cultural negation of blacks by white Americans, and the quest by five generations of black Americans for a cultural identity equal to those of white ethnic groups...

...Black and Hispanic Americans now are the most recent groups to participate in this politics of globalized ethnicity...

...5 In a similar vein Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, recently chastised Latin American intellectuals for the immaturity of their nationalist defense of Argentina during the conflict over the Falkland Islands...

...or (2) demagogues who, knowing that their goals are unattainable, pursue through ritualistic and charismatic manipulation a hidden agenda of personal power and wealth...

...The politics of a foreign-policy establishment requires systematic trade-offs with other American groups that compete for foreign-policy benefits...

...Unfortunately, the slavish posture of many Afro-American intellectuals toward sentimental racialism in relation to Africa—a common fare in articles in the journal Black Scholar—offers little ground for optimism...

...Such ethnic groups are sometimes trapped by what might be called the fallacy of the victims— namely, that power in the hands of history's victim is ipso facto morally preeminent...

...The primary contradiction is that while most Afro-Americans expect Africans to be spontaneously receptive to cultural-political ties with black societies in the Diaspora, such receptivity has in fact been problematic...

...representative to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations...

...The black population today would number among its middle and upper classes thousands of individuals like the thousands of Jewish Americans who are closely knitted together in behalf of globalizing Jewish ethnicity...

...Even so, the new black political class today, as compared to its predecessors, has ample resources—skills, leverage, and legitimacy—to effectively manage foreignpolicy pressures from black ethnocentric zealots...

...Fuentes wrote while the Argentine military junta was still in power: You have in Argentina one of the most repulsive regimes that has ever existed in the New World, in Latin America...

...We cannot build societies of the future on ideology, sacred thinking, the abuse of human rights, and simplistic nationalis' Ralph Nurnberger, "The United States and Idi Amin," African Studies Review, March 1982, p. 58...

...As a result, the political style of the new establishment seldom generates the sort of catharsis that the Garvey movement, the Black Muslims, and the 1960s militants inspired...

...Whether the settlers in Liberia fully grasped it or not, their experience as Americans within the South's plantation society had transformed them culturally to the point of no return, making re-Africanization unacceptable...

...In particular, Young influenced a leading civil rights figure in Philadelphia, the Rev...

...Allan Keyes, a Harvard-trained political scientist who is the U.S...

...and the late Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian, put his intellect at the service of human rights in Guyana, sacrificing his life in the process...

...It would be, after all, unworthy of the moral heritage of Afro-Americans—the heritage that Martin Luther King died for—should the fully justifiable aggressive feelings that they have toward South Africa be converted into support for an African race war...

...For while the scourge of white racism—and especially South African apartheid—warrants all the opposition black intellectuals can muster, their task in today's world is larger...

...The few courageous voices have been silenced or drowned out by jealous toadies maintained by this or that regime...

...So it is very difficult to back this junta, which has now taken Argentina on an adventurous course in order to distract attention from its pitiful failings, not only on human rights—we all know this—but also its economy...

...a founder of Camp Young Judaea of Amherst, New Jersey...

...Young's influence among Afro-Americans stimulated other political figures to concern themselves with African affairs...

...The Reagan presidency, in most areas, has tended to reduce the influence of the black foreign-policy establishment...

...This is evident, for example, in the impact of IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland upon the Irish American intelligentsia and the impact of Israeli treatment of Palestinian refugees upon the Jewish American intelligentsia...

...and Clement Cottingham, a political scientist at Rutgers University who directed the Ford Foundation's technical aid program in East Africa...

...And, in that same sense, it should be a crucial concern of black leaders involved in African affairs to minimize the usual vulgarizations of globalized ethnicity...

...Central to Garvey's leadership of the "Back-to-Africa" movement was his affirmation of the cultural superiority of the sector of Afro-Americans that was linked to the darkskinned folk Negro...

...Above all, because African leaders and modernized Africans in general do not require the ' "Heritage," in Countee Cullen, Color (New York: Harper Brothers, 1925...

...and Willard Johnson, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the major American expert on the Republic of Cameroon...

...That black American ethnicity has never generated a similar infrastructure is simply a fact of history...

...Reversing this history is, moreover, problematic...

...president of the New England Regional Council of the Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds...

...For the first time in this century, a key figure in the foreign-policy establishment was Afro-American, with his writ extending especially to African affairs...

...It is now open to whites and, under Wallace Muhammad, the movement's name has been changed, in order to rid it of racial exclusivity, to the American Muslim Mission...

...Usually uncritical of the policies of Arab states in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Said recently revealed a new side to his thinking...

...He then adds, turning his sights to policies of Arab regimes, that one wishes that after the routine summit meetings have been held, the Arab states would finally get around to the real priorities: restoring democratic processes...

...council member of the Zionist Organization of America...

...And Governor Carey's criticism of terror by both IRA and Protestants in Northern Ireland received prime news coverage, being a rare act...

...Since history's victims are not morally awesome, or guided by the restraints of a higher ethics, the power they acquire must be subject to moral scrutiny...

...But Afro-American ethnicity is forever ambivalent in form...

...It is precisely this kind of globalized ethnicity that produces perplexing moral and intellectual dilemmas...

...Much like other American ethnic groups new to power in foreign affairs, Afro-Americans display no special sensitivity to those areas of "homeland" affairs that fall beyond the reach of mere politics...

...VI The politics of globalized ethnicity is often more assertive in regard to the foreign-policy "rights" of ethnic groups than their foreignpolicy "obligations...

...We have to bring all these things together...

...Liberia's authoritarianism entailed the ultimate in moral degradation by Afro-American settlers—namely, participation in the sale of slaves in the era between the two world wars, causing enormous embarrassment for the black American intelligentsia...

...Since the early 1970s, this black foreign-policy establishment has increasingly replaced political activists like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X in mediating relations between Africa and Afro-Americans...

...member of the Chaim Weizmann Research Institute's national board...

...440...

...Consequently, most endeavors to transnationalize black ethnicity into a force supporting Africa's advancement have been fraught with dilemmas...

...The black foreign-policy establishment, which is part of this new political class, includes a sizable group of Afro-American foreignaffairs experts who work at foundations, universities, and multinational corporations...

...Garvey celebrated the kinky hair of the dark- and black-skinned folk Negro, his short stature, his flattened nose, his full and fleshy lips...

...Young's appointment enabled blacks, for the first time, to feel capable of tilting American power in behalf of Africa's quest for development...

...The Hutu in Burundi exist within a cohesive societal fabric producing an enduring individual identity...

...New York Times...

...The Black Muslims in the 1960s, because they assumed that Africans have a natural predilection for American blacks of Muslim persuasion, concluded they would be more successful than other Diaspora blacks at forging links with Africans...

...Throughout the 1970s Afro-American intellectuals, including foreign-policy experts, remained pathetically and embarrassingly silent in face of the decadent and barbarous rule of Idi Amin in Uganda—a rule of such cruelty that Amnesty International estimated that there were over 200,000 political murders in the years 1972-79...

...In the short run, this might mean that a new generation of black separatists, dissatisfied with the incremental gains of the policy technicians, will resort to militant strategies...

...For just as the ethnocentric manipulations of Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, Greek Americans, and others in the global extension of ethnicity cultivate not merely the altruistic but also the xenophobic and aggressive instincts of their supporters, so black-militant appeals cultivate a mixture of altruistic and aggressive feelings among AfroAmericans...

...and] financing more education, social justice, and health, instead of internal security...

...Iv American Jews, as is well known, have successfully extended their ethnicity in the service of Israel's development...

...A model of vigilance in this matter has been established by such American Jewish intellectuals as Irving Howe and the late Henry Pachter who, while recognizing the validity of the Israeli state, have insisted on the values of equity when considering its behavior...

...The new leadership of the Black Muslims—following Elijah Muhammad's death—has deethnicized or deracialized the movement...

...Afro-American intellectuals in general failed to grasp the moral dimension of the carnage, seizing every opportunity to excuse it by reference to the denial of human rights elsewhere in the world, especially in the racist regime that governed South Africa—rather like those Jewish American intellectuals who ignore Israel's transgression of Palestinian rights by pointing to transgressions of Arab regimes...

...Ted Brown, an official in the (U.S...

...Harry Levine elaborated his Israel-sustaining ties through participation in a bewildering maze of organizations: he was a member of the American Zionist Youth Commission...

...Only a few individuals among either group display a will to articulate these dilemmas and to confront them...

...Efforts to globalize ethnic ties persist throughout the 20th century, gaining in force and frequency in the years after the Second World War...

...Thus Polish Americans supporting freedom in Communist Poland, Irish Americans supporting the Easter Rebellion, and Jewish Americans supporting the independence of Israel are, it seems, unavoidable extensions to the "homeland" of political influence that ethnic groups acquire in America...

...Though deferential to some Arab clichés by referring to Israel as an "outlaw state," Said goes on to chastise the main body of Arab intellectuals who have played the role of translator or servant to the day's dominant [Arab] power [acting as] legitimizers of the established order, generally not agents of change...

...When Congress belatedly discussed the slaughter in Uganda in 1977, Charles Diggs, a leading black congressman (D-Michigan), chairman of the African Subcommittee of the House Committee on International Relations, "was concerned that a 438 congressional investigation of Uganda might divert public attention from human rights conditions in South Africa.'" It remains to be seen whether Afro-Americans, following the pattern set by only a few American ethnic groups, will undertake a moral and ethical scrutiny of the politics of transnationalizing black ethnicity...

...HI The special complex of cultural identity and habits we call ethnicity has always proved elusive in modern societies...

...By the late 1970s the so-called Sullivan Guidelines were adopted by several major American corporations, including the Ford Motor Company...

...Had the character of black American ethnicity been different, more like that of American Jews, the legacy of culturally strident movements among Afro-Americans would also have been different...

...officer of the National Zionist Emergency Council, of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Zionist Organization of America, and the United Jewish Appeal...

...Between 1965 and 1980, Afro-Americans experienced a new addition to the ranks of the black bourgeoisie—namely, a sizable black political class, centered around over 5,000 elected officials (congressmen, mayors, city councilors, county officials, and so on), including perhaps 20,000 bureaucrats and appointed officeholders...

...And there are many more.' Such individuals constitute a professional elite skilled in matters that relate to foreign policy in general and Africa in particular...