UCLA

This study examines how Black Americans’ interpellated experiences with racism impact diplomatic life and work in the African region, in the context of emerging diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that promote the recruitment of Americans from a variety of marginalized backgrounds into the Foreign Service, or diplomatic corps, in the US Department of State. Through an ethnography of the diplomatic lives of Black Americans at the Department of State, this dissertation uncovers the complexities of the foreign policymaking process: expertise communities, power assemblages in major diplomatic metropoles, like Washington, DC, bureaucratic ideologies, training and peer discipline, and the hubris of American exceptionalism in international politics. I consider the myriad of ways policy is constructed, incubated, and disseminated in everyday administrative actions, such as writing, elite educational circles, and ambiguous social, professional, and personal spaces in which the State Department trains and comports actors to be diplomats in a well-defined culture of foreign policymaking. Black Americans, who have endured ongoing anti-Black violence, oppression, exploitation, and discrimination from the nation’s inception, affirm the importance of a diversified diplomatic corps; one that truly represents the multicultural identity embedded within the idea of an American. I contend that while Black Americans learn, practice, and implement expected norms of diplomatic statecraft, their approach, nonetheless, is framed by their racial subjectivity, phenomenological understandings of Blackness as it moves across borders, and attention to the complex interplay between US empire and racial hierarchies in global governance. An embodied tension emerges for Black Americans hoping to reconcile centuries of US racism embedded in domestic and foreign policy–a legacy that structures their own marginalization as employees at the Department of State and throughout US society and has contributed to the subjugation of African partners in geopolitics and multilateral diplomacy. Situated ethnographically in Washington, DC, this dissertation reveals a constellation of Black policy actors who draw on and engage with notions of Blackness, Americanness, and diaspora to construct physical, digital, and interpersonal spaces that grapple with the historical and contemporary tensions of race in US foreign relations in Africa.