INTRODUCTION
Just as we were called colored, but were not that, to be called black is just as baseless. Every ethnic group in this country has reference to some cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of maturity.
—Jesse Jackson Sr., speech in Chicago, Illinois, 1988
All politics is local.
—Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill (D-Mass.), speaker of the House, 1977–1987
On February 23, 1999, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) took the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to deliver a speech in support of his signature legislative priority in the 106th Congress—the Human Rights, Opportunity, Partnership and Empowerment (HOPE) for Africa Act. In the speech, Representative Jackson urged his colleagues to embrace his HOPE bill to defend African nations against burgeoning “trade pressures” imposed by the United States and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In short, Jackson argued that the U.S. government should be working to extend more aid to the continent rather than forcing these nations to sign on to a “NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] for Africa.”1
For more than two generations, political scientists and diplomatic historians have maintained that transnationalism is the best lens through which to understand the way that the elite members of minority groups mobilize on behalf of their ancestral homelands in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.2 Social scientists use the term transnationalism to refer to an orientation that leads individuals and groups living in one nation to engage in behaviors that maintain active linkages with their ancestral homelands.3 Most researchers see transnationalism as rooted in rich affective ties to “families, communities, traditions, and causes” in the ancestral homeland.4 Moreover, there is broad consensus within the literature that most transnationalist behaviors are signaling games designed to reinforce collective identities.5 Under this view, measures such as Representative Jackson’s HOPE bill are expressive behaviors aimed at emphasizing and strengthening affective ties to ancestral homelands.6 This theory is so popular among scholars of political science and history that it holds the status of a universal explanation, or covering law, within these disciplines.7 In other words, whenever most researchers in these fields see the elite members of ethnic and racial groups mobilizing around an issue in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena that affects their ancestral homelands, they assume that commitments derived from affective ties to these homelands are the sole explanation for this political behavior.
On first glance, Representative Jackson’s behavior does seem to conform to the predictions generated by this dominant paradigm. After all, Jackson was a rising star within the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), an organization with a long-standing history of advocacy on behalf of Africa, when he introduced his HOPE bill. Moreover, Jackson, the eldest son of the veteran civil rights activist Jesse Jackson Sr., used his own formidable oratorical skills and the symbols of the civil rights movement to play up the transnationalist dimensions of his support for the bill in his speech and his subsequent contacts with the press.8
When we delve a little deeper into the legislative history of the HOPE bill, however, an empirical puzzle emerges that confounds the dominant paradigm. Jackson’s reference to NAFTA in his speech was a thinly veiled attack on the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a rival measure designed to promote greater free trade between the United States and the African continent. Although the AGOA was by no means a perfect compact, all forty-seven African governments recognized by the United Nations were enthusiastic about the legislation and had spent considerable financial and diplomatic resources during the 106th Congress working to secure its passage.9 Moreover, many of these same governments had pushed for decades for greater access to U.S. products and markets through trade relationships.10 So, why would Representative Jackson introduce legislation to protect African nations from trade relationships that they openly courted? More important, how would Jackson forge closer ties with the ancestral homeland by opposing the AGOA?
The fact of the matter is that Representative Jackson probably knew well before he introduced the measure that his HOPE bill had little chance of altering the course of U.S. relations with Africa. Indeed, Jackson introduced the measure to provide ideological cover for himself and other black members of Congress who opposed the AGOA because they feared that it would have a deleterious effect on either their constituents or powerful political allies on the home front. In other words, Jackson’s HOPE bill was really a strategic move designed to advance his interests in the domestic political environment and not an expressive act borne of affective ties to the African continent.
This narrative is just one of many that I will recount in this book that demonstrate the necessity of pushing beyond the expressive behavior model of the motivations of ethnic and racial groups in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. This is not to say that the expressive behavior model holds no analytical or predictive power for understanding the motivations of the elite members of these groups when engaging with U.S. foreign policy toward their ancestral homelands. On the contrary, we have a wealth of empirical evidence that suggests that emotive commitments derived from a transnationalist orientation do often play an important, and sometimes even necessary, role in the equation. At the same time, there is clear evidence that such commitments are rarely sufficient to lead black activists, intellectuals, and politicians to take up the work of advocating for their ancestral homelands in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.
The decisions that minority elites make about mobilizing in the foreign policymaking arena on behalf of their homelands emerge from strategic calculations balancing the value of the engagement against the costs accrued in the domestic arena. In short, the behavior of the majority of the black intellectuals, politicians, and social movement leaders—whose activism takes center stage in this book—conforms to the logic of two-level games first articulated by scholars of international relations in the 1960s.11 Black leaders tend to make their most robust transnationalist (or Pan-African) expressions in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena when such activism dovetails with the goals that they are pursuing in the domestic arena.12 By contrast, when expressions of transnationalism hold the potential to generate cross-pressures—such as the ones Representative Jackson and some of his colleagues faced around the AGOA—or threaten goals that they are pursuing on the home front, black elites typically disengage from serious foreign policy efforts on behalf of their ancestral homelands.
Over the past several decades, scholars of voting behavior and legislative studies have repeatedly demonstrated that the long history of systemic antiblack racism in the United States has created special bonds among black Americans.13 In this book, I present numerous cases in which these bonds magnified the effect of the representational imperatives that typically lead the elite members of ethnic and racial groups to privilege their commitments in the domestic environment over transnationalist activities in the foreign policymaking arena. Moreover, these same bonds also help us to understand why transnationalist initiatives in the foreign policymaking arena have occasionally become domesticated issues in black politics.14
This model of black elite behavior in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena holds many advantages over the dominant paradigm. First, it allows us to account for the fact that the expressions of transnationalism made by black elites have waxed and waned over time. Second, it brings domestic politics back into the equation, which helps us to adjudicate recent debates among scholars of black politics about how black leaders’ engagement with issues in African affairs shapes their ability to represent their constituents on the domestic policy arena. Third, by demonstrating that black elites filter their decisions about mobilizing on behalf of Africa through a heuristic derived from calculations of their domestic interests, it provides a strong challenge to those who argue that such behavior is irredentist.
Theoretical Context and Core Arguments
It is easy to understand why so many scholars subscribe to the view that transnationalism drives the behavior of the black elite on issues in African affairs. The vast majority of studies took place in the wake of the civil rights and black power movements; this means that social scientists and historians turned their attention to this issue at a time when the identification of black Americans with Africa was near its zenith.15 With so many black politicians and activists extolling the importance of affective ties to Africa during that period,16 transnationalism appeared to provide the perfect covering law to explain the actions of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Moreover, this explanation dovetailed with findings about the behavior of elite actors from European-descent ethnic groups, which added further credibility to the model.17
But, unlike covering laws in the field of experimental physics, which are ironclad, even the most well-established theories of political behavior are only probabilistic in nature.18 This means that counterexamples will always present challenges to the validity of theories that we use to make sense of political life. Despite the fact that many social scientists advocate that we strive for the same degree of validity that physical scientists achieve in their work, those who support the dominant theory of black elite behavior have been slow to acknowledge cases that call that theory into question.
This is so for two reasons. First, most of the studies used to support the dominant theory focus on a very short time period—the twenty-nine years between the emergence of Ghana as an independent nation and the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986—when black politicians, intellectuals, and activists were hypermobilized around African affairs. Thus, the first qualitative studies of black elite engagement with Africa were based on samples in which respondents overwhelmingly attributed their behavior to transnationalism rooted in affective ties to the continent.19
It is tempting to accuse these scholars of the type of selection bias that methodologists such as Barbara Geddes have demonstrated frequently undermines single-case designs.20 Geddes rightly argues that “selecting on the dependent variable” leads to “pitfalls” in case-study research by “overestimating” the role that a causal variable plays in explaining an outcome.21 To get around this problem, Geddes urges researchers to “examine a wider range of cases.”22 The problem for the scholars who conducted the first wave of studies of black elite engagement with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa is that knowledge about previous epochs was extremely limited. Indeed, the majority of historical accounts of black elite behavior in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena did not appear until several years after the first social science studies.
Moreover, and this is the second reason why the dominant theory has not been vigorously challenged, the majority of the historical literature focuses on black elite behavior between 1935 and 1960. During this period, according to these studies, the Cold War context forced black elites to suppress their natural tendency to mobilize on behalf of Africa in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena to avoid persecution on the home front. In short, the consensus within the historical literature is that exogenous shocks are the major source of variation in black elite behavior.23
My goal in this book is not to overturn the view that transnationalism is an important force motivating the black elite in its attempts to shape U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. On the contrary, many dimensions of the analytic narratives presented here provide confirmation of this theory. But, at the same time, the narratives show that transnationalism alone is typically insufficient to mobilize the black elite to try to influence U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Moreover, a transnationalist outlook does not guarantee that black politicians and activists will work constructively on behalf of what they understand to be the interests of the African continent. Consider, for example, that Representative Jackson and many of the other fifteen CBC members who were against the AGOA frequently professed to hold transnationalist commitments at the same time that they were working to kill the bill.
Recognizing that black politicians and activists view their activities in the foreign policymaking arena as fundamentally bound up with their activities in the domestic environment is the best way to resolve this conundrum and the many others presented in the substantive chapters. In short, members of the black elite strive to strike a balance between their political activities in the domestic arena and their activism in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Indeed, scholars of international relations have long argued that U.S. foreign policy is often rooted in domestic sources. Many of the early works in this literature simply demonstrated that U.S. policies tended to reflect the values of the U.S. public as expressed through opinion surveys.24 Other studies traced the origins of U.S. foreign policy back to a remote cause in the domestic sphere through detailed “policy histories.”25
In 1978, Robert D. Putnam presented the first systematic evidence of a link between the domestic sphere and the behavior of the governmental officials who control the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. After observing several rounds of international negotiations, Putnam concluded that U.S. diplomats consider what is best for powerful domestic interests when negotiating international treaties. Putnam referred to this tendency of diplomats to seek to balance their commitments to abstract principles against the demands of powerful domestic interests as the “logic of two-level games.”26 The analytic narratives presented in this book demonstrate that the engagement by the black elite with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa conforms to this same two-level logic. In other words, black activists and politicians pay considerable attention to how their actions in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena will play with their constituents and affect the entire black community in the domestic environment.
The historians who documented the way that groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reduced their rhetorical attacks on U.S. allies that held colonies in Africa during the Cold War to avoid persecution during the Red Scare were certainly aware of this underlying dynamic. The limitation of these studies, however, is that their focus on the exogenous nature of the repressive climate that accompanied the rise of the national security state under Harry Truman obscures that this balancing between the priorities of U.S. foreign policy and the demands of the home front is the equilibrium position for black politicians and activists. In other words, the Cold War was not an exception to the rule but, rather, merely an instance of the two-level game that leaders have played since the early nineteenth century. Moreover, an examination of black elite engagement with African affairs over a longer period shows that dynamics internal to the black community play a large role in shaping its ability to pursue transnationalist initiatives in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.
In the wake of the landmark National Black Election Studies (NBES) conducted by Patricia Gurin, Shirley J. Hatchett, and James Jackson in 1984 and 1988, public opinion scholars reached a consensus that upper- and middle-income blacks think very differently about racial group membership than do their white counterparts.27 In short, upper- and middle-income blacks demonstrate a strong sense of linked fate with other blacks. Michael Dawson claims that this finding is a function of the fact that “until at least the late 1960s, individual African Americans’ life chances were over determined by the ascriptive feature of race.”28 In light of this regularity, Dawson argues, black Americans developed a “black utility heuristic” to “economize” the decision-making process about both policies and political candidates.29 “This heuristic,” he continues, “suggests that as long as race remains dominant in determining the lives of individual blacks, it is rational for American Americans to follow group cues in interpreting and acting in the political world.”30 In addition, Dawson asserts that the “tendency of African Americans to follow racial cues has been reinforced historically by institutions developed during the forced separation of blacks from whites during the post-Reconstruction period.”31
Several scholars have argued recently that black members of Congress rely on a similar schema to guide their behavior as legislators.32 “The Congressional Black Caucus,” Katherine Tate writes, “would declare its mission as national with a primary focus on the needs and interests of Black Americans.”33 Similarly, Richard Fenno writes that black legislators see themselves as “representing a national constituency of black citizens who live beyond the border of any one member’s district, but with whom all black members share a set of race-related concerns.”34 The tendency for black leaders to exhibit a strong sense of linked fate with their constituents did not start with black members of Congress serving in the Post–Civil Rights Era. On the contrary, as Kevin Gaines demonstrates in his seminal historical work on black leadership, Uplifting the Race, this norm has been deeply rooted among black activists and politicians since at least the late nineteenth century.35
Building on this body of work, I show that the strong sense of sharing a group identity with the black masses leads black elites to privilege the domestic context over the international when trying to balance their political portfolios. As a result, black leaders have the most freedom to engage issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa when such mobilization either bears no costs or generates positive benefits on the home front. Moreover, members of the black elite sometimes mobilize in the foreign policymaking arena primarily to generate these externalities. Indeed, this type of behavior—which proponents of the two-level game model in the international relations literature call second-image effects—is frequently in evidence in the narratives presented in this book.36
The importance of transnationalism as a force that sometimes motivates members of the black elite to engage with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa is undeniable. It is also clear, however, that black leaders set limits on how far they will go in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena based on calculations about what is expedient for black Americans on the home front. There are times, as several scholars have pointed out, when the black community becomes hypermobilized around events in Africa and the distinction between the domestic and international arenas becomes blurred.37 Yet these periods when issues in U.S. foreign policy become so domesticated38 within the black community that they are transposed into just another racial group interest are exceedingly rare. Indeed, black politicians receive cues from their constituents, demonstrating Representative Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neil’s maxim that “All politics is local.” This finding presents a significant challenge to those, such as Samuel Huntington, who argue that that the tendency of ethnic and racial groups to mobilize around the concerns of their ancestral homelands in the foreign policymaking arena portends the Balkanization of the United States.39
Although black elite members generally work very hard to stay in line with the preferences that their constituents communicate through these cues, they are by no means completely subservient to public opinion in the black community. Indeed, some of the most dramatic episodes presented in the analytic narratives unpack conflicts that erupted between black leaders and the rank-and-file over issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. As shown in chapter 1, the black elite’s hostility toward the grassroots exodus movements that swept through black communities in the Counter-Reconstruction period is undoubtedly the most notable example of this type of conflict.
Some scholars have argued that the existence of such ruptures demonstrates that black leaders are often out of touch with the concerns and demands of their constituents. This argument cuts two ways in the literature on black leadership and representation. On the one hand, scholars such as Nell Painter, a historian, suggest that black leaders sometimes break ranks with their constituents in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena because they are interested in preserving their positions of privilege within the U.S. government.40 On the other hand, Carol Swain, a political scientist, argues in her work on the CBC that black leaders often push foreign policy initiatives against the wishes of their constituents to generate second-image effects.41 No matter how we parse the particulars, the bottom line is that both these scholars (and many others) assert that these conflicts between the masses and black leaders over transnationalist goals are evidence that the latter are failed representatives.
Building on Gaines’s work, I show that these conflicts are more illustrative of the paternalism that often informs the black elite’s commitment to uplifting their lower-class brethren than a complete abrogation of leadership. In short, the U.S. foreign policymaking arena sometimes becomes a theater in which black politicians and activists perform deeply flawed morality plays aimed at demonstrating to the masses that they know what is best for the race. Ironically, then, even on the few occasions when they have ignored the preferences of their constituents during these episodes, black leaders have seen themselves as fulfilling the representational imperatives dictated by the black utility heuristic. This interpretation aligns this book with studies by scholars who argue that black elites (though imperfect) have been mostly sincere brokers on behalf of their constituents in U.S. politics.42
Approach, Methods, and Data
The quantitative revolution that took place in American political science in the 1960s and 1970s had its most pronounced impact on the subfield of American politics.43 Over the past two decades, the tolerance for multimethod research has grown dramatically within the subfield. This shift—which is still in process—is undoubtedly a product of the intense period of contestation over epistemology that has taken place within the entire discipline since the beginning of the twenty-first century.44 At the same time, it is clear that two communities of scholars within the subfield, the American political development (APD) and race, ethnicity, and politics (REP) movements, have been at the cutting edge with regard to this issue for several decades.
Both groups of scholars pushed for greater methodological pluralism because they found quantitative approaches based on large data sets—which tend to present mere “snap-shots” of attitudes and institutional trends—insufficient for understanding the development of political dynamics over long periods.45 Despite this common concern, cross-fertilization between APD and REP scholars has been minimal because APD scholars are generally interested in macro-level developments whereas REP scholars tend to focus on political behavior at the group and individual levels. Recently, scholars in both fields have called for greater integration between the two traditions.46 For example, Hanes Walton, one of the deans of the study of black political behavior, has suggested that we would gain greater clarity about the connections between the concept of race and political outcomes if scholars working in the REP subfield eschewed their recent obsession with the individual and paid greater attention to institutions and social context.47
Taking up Walton’s charge, in each chapter I situate the efforts of black leaders to exert influence in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena within the political context of the historical period under study. I do this by reconstructing elite discourse and mass opinion through analyses of archival materials and by taking stock of major shifts in institutional structure, partisan alignments, and the law that were of special concern to the black community during each period.48 I then consider how some of the arguments that APD scholars make about institutional stability and temporality shed light on the behavior of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, for example, have argued that we should pay greater attention to critical junctures that either reinforce the stable elements or puncture the equilibriums within institutions.49 Looking at the historical record of black Americans’ engagement with Africa in this way allows us to see the considerable continuity that has defined the behavior of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.
The analytic narratives approach I employ here anchors the research enterprise and synthesizes the insights developed by both APD and REP scholars. In other words, I test the deductive theory outlined through detailed narratives that span the period from 1816 to 2000. This approach, first developed by proponents of rational choice theory, holds several benefits over the available alternatives.50 First, the approach facilitates the kind of congruence testing that is necessary to demonstrate the existence of the empirical puzzles under investigation.51 The analytic narratives approach also enables the process tracing (the identification of new causal chains and mechanisms) required to establish the validity of the alternative theory of black elite behavior that I posit.52 Social scientists use process tracing to, in the words of Stephen Van Evera, international relations scholar, “unwrap” and “divide into smaller steps” the links between causes and effects.53 In short, process tracing is a search for causal mechanisms.
I use multiple sources of data to recover the narratives examined in this book. First, following in the footsteps of many eminent scholars in APD, comparative political development, and sociology, I use published secondary materials as the primary source of data.54 The vast majority of the data used to make causal inferences about black elite behavior in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena, however, is the product of primary materials from archives,55 public records, and human subjects.
Then, I employ several qualitative methods and statistical modeling to analyze these data.56 I use content analysis of documents and print sources to develop proxies for elite attitudes and public opinion about issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. The systematic analysis of media representations has long been a tool employed by social scientists to gain traction on questions in both public opinion and institutional research.57 Moreover, political scientists interested in understanding racial dynamics in the United States have become particularly adept at using content analysis to arrive at richer explanations of political behavior and institutional dynamics.58
The Road Ahead
In chapter 1, I explore the ways that black elites engaged with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa between 1816 and 1900. Some scholars have argued that the behavior of the black elite has never held more significance for black Americans’ domestic struggle for equality than it did in these years.59 This is so because the federal government frequently promoted policies that encouraged black emigration to Liberia as a means of reconstituting the United States as an all-white republic. For the most part, during this period the black elite rejected any association with the African continent and worked hard to block policies that sought to stimulate the growth of Liberia. There are, however, several notable cases in which the black elite broke from this pattern and worked to assist the development of Liberia. The conventional wisdom is that the black elite’s commitments to a transnational sense of community trumped their concerns about their black U.S. citizenship status during these periods.60 But my analyses of the archival materials undermine this assertion. Indeed, I find that members of the black elite entered the foreign policymaking arena in support of Liberia only when they calculated that doing so would shift the national discourse about the capacity of the black race for U.S. citizenship.
In chapter 2, I examine the ways that black elites responded to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) movement and the grassroots protest movement that emerged in black communities during the Italian-Ethiopian War. I focus on the question: Why did the black elite oppose Garveyism, perhaps the most successful mass movement with Pan-African goals in U.S. history, at a time when most black leaders were also committed to transnationalism in the U.S. foreign policy? Some studies maintain that the black elite members worked against Garvey because they viewed his rapid success in building a mass movement as a threat to the survival of their own organizations.61 The majority of the literature, however, suggests that the rift between Garvey and the black leadership class was due to a clash of personalities.62 The research presented in chapter 2 shows that black leaders shunned Garvey because they viewed his movement as an attempt to resurrect the long-repudiated ideology of emigrationism. Moreover, their strong sense of linked fate with the black masses made most of the leading activists, politicians, and intellectuals in the black community hypersensitive to the exploitative dimensions of the Garvey movement. In addition, the black elite feared that Garvey’s high potential for failure would damage the credibility of the black masses in the public sphere.
The literature dealing with the black elite’s engagement with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa focuses primarily on the activities of the NAACP between 1935 and 1955.63 According to most of these studies, during the interwar period the NAACP entered the foreign policymaking arena on behalf of Africa as part of a strategy to build a global movement against racism and colonialism.64 The rise of the Cold War then forced the NAACP to set aside its political commitments derived from transnationalism to avoid persecution by the national security state of the Truman administration.65 The conventional wisdom within this body of scholarship also sees this strategic shift as facilitating the collapse of anticolonial politics in the black community during this period.66 In chapter 3, I challenge all of these assumptions. As I show, the NAACP (and other mainstream civil rights organizations) always saw its anticolonial agitation as an extension of its politics on the home front. As a result, the shift of the organization to an anticommunist anticolonialism was well in line with its behavior before World War II. Most important, the NAACP was able to use this anticommunist frame as a political means to push the Truman and John F. Kennedy administrations on the issue of colonialism in Africa. There is, in fact, evidence that bureaucrats within the Kennedy administration invited these groups into the policy formulation process to gain a greater degree of autonomy within the executive branch. This finding provides a strong challenge to the view that bureaucrats within the national security state have viewed black elite activism on behalf of Africa with antipathy.
In chapter 4, I demonstrate how the political context of black politics shifted in response to the decolonization movements that swept across Africa beginning in the 1950s. My main finding is that both the black elite and the masses rewrote their prevailing notions of black authenticity in response to these African decolonization movements. This new black authenticity grew out of the notion that Africa was now a place to look for models to challenge white supremacy on the home front. Due to this transformation, black Americans now saw their collective fate as linked with the new nations in Africa. Although, the black elite and the rank-and-file generally agreed on the terms of this new authenticity, the paternalistic notion held by members of the black elite that they were in control of the civil rights movement did sometimes lead to conflict between these two segments of the community. These occasional breaks, however, were far less frequent than the scholarly literature suggests. Indeed, for the most part, there was widespread agreement within the black community about the importance of Africa for the domestic movement by the close of the UN Year of Africa.
In chapter 5, I focus on the role that the CBC has played in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa since the 1960s. The pivotal role of the CBC in passing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986 (which placed sanctions on South Africa) forms the backdrop to my account. Previous studies tend to view the activism of the CBC on this issue as a function of its deep commitments to striking down the last vestiges of settler colonialism in Africa and to forging ties with the ancestral homeland.67 My analyses of archival materials and interviews with important members of the black elite confirm that affective ties to black South Africans living under apartheid were an important force motivating the CBC during its long campaign to pass a sanctions bill. I also demonstrate here that strategic calculations about what was expedient on the home front played an even larger role in pushing the CBC to initiate sanctions legislation; moreover, the black legislators’ domestic orientation is crucial for understanding the contours of CBC activism in African affairs since 1986. Both the statistical analyses and interviews with CBC members presented in chapter 5 demonstrate that affective ties to the African continent remained robust within the group. These same data also reveal, however, that those CBC members who worked to defeat the AGOA did so because they feared that the bill would generate dire economic consequences for their constituents. Thus, the same logic that pushed the entire CBC to enter the U.S. foreign policymaking arena on behalf of South Africa in the 1980s encouraged many black legislators to oppose the AGOA in 2000.
Following the tests of my core arguments in the narrative chapters of the book, in my concluding chapter I evaluate the contributions of the strategic behavior model of black elite activism in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. The first broad contribution is the way in which the model helps us to resolve the problems associated with the fact that the commitments of black leaders to mobilize on behalf of Africa waxes and wanes over time. Indeed, were the expressive behavior model an accurate depiction of reality, we would expect the majority of black elites to remain constantly mobilized around the stated preferences advanced by the governments of their ancestral homelands. On the contrary, as the behavior of Representative Jackson and many other figures who take center stage in this book illustrates, black leaders often take policy positions that stand in opposition to the goals that the governments of their ancestral homeland pursue in the U.S. foreign policy. As I show, the two-level games metaphor at the heart of the strategic behavior model gives us greater theoretical purchase on the behavior of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena because it is clear that black leaders jealously guard their interests and those of their constituents in the domestic arena. This model, in addition, has broad applicability to other racial and ethnic groups. Finally, I show how this alternative theory also helps us resolve recent intellectual debates about the impact of transnationalism on U.S. foreign policy and the quality of black representation in U.S. politics.