CONCLUSION

[T]he concept of race has changes so much and presented so much of a contradiction that as I face Africa I ask myself: what is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can explain.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940).

But can a people (its faith in an idealized American creed notwithstanding) live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?

—Ralph Ellison, “Review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma,” Antioch Review (1944).

The elite members of ethnic and racial minority groups have sought to influence U.S. foreign policy toward their ancestral homelands since at least the nineteenth century.1 For more than two generations, political scientists and diplomatic historians have argued that transnationalism is the best theoretical vantage point for understanding the actions of these elites in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.2 According to this perspective, when the elite members of ethnic and racial minorities seek to carve out a distinctive voice on issues in U.S. foreign policy toward their ancestral homelands they are engaging in expressive behavior aimed at reifying their affective ties to these nations.3 In this book, I demonstrate the limitations of this model and develop an alternative theory.

This is not to say that commitments derived from transnationalism are unimportant in spurring the elite members of minority groups to engage with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward their ancestral homelands. On the contrary, there is a wealth of empirical evidence suggesting that these sentiments often play an important, and sometimes even necessary, role in the equation. At the same time, as the analytic narratives from the historical record demonstrate, sentiments derived from affective ties are rarely sufficient on their own to motivate these leaders to take up the work of advocating for their ancestral homelands in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Thus, we gain greater theoretical purchase on this dimension of minority politics through the alternative theoretical perspective developed in this book.

The central axiom in the alternative theory holds that the decisions that minority elites make about mobilizing in the foreign policymaking arena on behalf of their ancestral homelands emerge from strategic calculations that seek to balance the value of the engagement against the costs accrued in the domestic arena. In short, the behavior of minority elites in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena conforms to the “logic of two-level games.”4 Thus, the most robust expressions of transnationalism in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena occur when such activism dovetails with the goals that elite members of ethnic and minority groups are pursuing in the domestic arena. By contrast, when expressions of transnationalism hold the potential to generate cross-pressures or threaten to undermine the goals that these leaders are pursuing on the home front, they typically disengage from serious efforts on behalf of their ancestral homelands.

In this book, I have provided both demonstrations of the shortcomings of the expressive behavior model and empirical tests of my alternative theory through analytic narratives based on the black experience in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena between 1816 and 2000. I used multiple data sources to develop the analytic narratives featured in the book; moreover, I used both qualitative and quantitative methods to test the core propositions of my strategic behavior model, and the model held up very well through these tests.

Beyond providing evidence in support of the strategic behavior model of minority group activism in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena, the analytic narratives presented in this book also make at least three other contributions to the field of political science. First, they demonstrate the considerable gains that are possible by studying ethnic and racial politics through a perspective that merges insights from the APD and REP subfields. Indeed, scholars can gain a fuller sense of stability and change in identity politics by deploying the APD concepts of critical junctures and increasing returns with Walton’s notion of the political context variable. It is only through such a synthesis that we can finally begin model the interplay between the prevailing structures of race relations and racial hierarchies in societies—what Desmond King and Rogers Smith, both APD scholars, call “racial orders”5—and the behavior of political actors seeking to maintain and challenge these orders. In addition, the analytic narratives point to a way to extend the scope of the core theories that animate scholarship in the REP subfield. The leading scholars in this area have always turned to developments in political and social history to improve their theory-building enterprises.6 Further gains are possible by following the lead of APD scholars in using path-dependence more frequently in the study of social movements, political behavior, and representation in minority communities.7

The second broad contribution of this study is its potential to reorient the very robust literature on the behavior of the elite members of ethnic and racial minority groups within the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Within this literature, developed by political scientists and historians in the 1980s and 1990s,8 there is broad consensus on two issues: (1) that the leaders of ethnic and racial minority groups remain mobilized around issues in U.S. foreign policy that affect their ancestral homelands (or regions) and (2) that this mobilization is a function of their affective ties to these homelands. In other words, an affect-rich attachment is both a necessary and sufficient condition to spur elites to pursue transnationalist goals in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. The findings presented throughout this book show that framing the motivations of the leaders of ethnic and racial groups in this way obscures a great deal of the complexity of their behavior in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Indeed, strategic considerations derived from the domestic environment play a prominent role in determining whether a group will mobilize on behalf of its kith and kin abroad. In the absence of a direct connection to the domestic goals of the group, affective ties are often insufficient to motivate black Americans to represent the interests of Africa in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. In short, it is best to think of the behavior of ethnic and racial elites in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena as conforming to the logic of two-level games.9

Third, bringing strategic considerations into the analysis also sheds new light on the long-standing debate between irredentists and democratic-pluralists about the implications of transnationalism for domestic unity. Because the scholars and practitioners of politics who make up the irredentist community believe that loyalty is a zero-sum game, they see expressions of transnationalism as emblematic of an assimilation crisis that threatens to Balkanize the United States.10 Moreover, because they see domestic tranquility as the key to success on the world stage, irredentists tend to recommend either the establishment of new norms to minimize the voices of ethnic and racial groups in the foreign policymaking arena and or the scaling back of engagements abroad.11 Democratic-pluralists, on the other hand, completely reject the contention that the expansion of ethnic and racial group influence in the foreign policymaking arena has had a deleterious effect on U.S. unity. Instead, they argue that expressions of transnationalism in the foreign policymaking arena are often the first signs that newly incorporated groups understand the rules of the democratic political game in the United States.12 In making their case for this interpretation of transnationalism, democratic-pluralists tend to stress that the objectives ethnic and racial groups pursue in the foreign policymaking arena are typically consistent with preexisting U.S. goals in their ancestral homelands.13

This study bolsters the claims of the democratic-pluralists. Were the irredentists right, and expressions of transnationalism pointed to a broader assimilation crisis in the United States, the subjects of my study would have demonstrated no sensitivity whatsoever to the demands of the domestic context. On the contrary, nothing could be farther from the truth. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black Americans not only remained cognizant of how their expressions of transnationalism were perceived by their fellow citizens, but they also tended to set real limits on their activism in the foreign policymaking arena to avoid jeopardizing valuable political capital in the domestic arena. Indeed, my research reveals that in a number of cases black Americans refused to mobilize on behalf of Africa in the foreign policymaking arena because such actions threatened to undermine their interests in the domestic environment. The tendency of black Americans to engage in this type of balancing behavior to protect the interests of the race at home is undeniable evidence of assimilation.

As we have seen, public opinion scholars reached a consensus in the late 1980s that middle- and upper-income blacks think very differently about racial-group membership than do their white counterparts.14 In short, middle- and upper-income blacks demonstrate a strong sense of linked fate with other members of their racial group. Michael Dawson claims that this 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.” As a result, Dawson argues, black Americans developed a “black utility heuristic” to “economize” the decision-making process about policies and political candidates. “This heuristic 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.”15 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.”16

Several scholars have argued recently that black members of Congress rely on this heuristic to guide their behavior in the institution.17 “The Congressional Black Caucus,” Tate writes, “would declare its mission as national with a primary focus on the needs and interests of Black Americans.”18 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.”19

The tendency for the black elite to exhibit a strong sense of linked fate with their constituents did not start with black members of Congress who served in the Post–Civil Rights Era. As the historian Kevin Gaines demonstrated in his seminal 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.20 Gaines’s work is also important because it shows that the good intentions of the black elite are sometimes merged with paternalism and other biases against the rank-and-file.

Carol Swain goes even farther in her study of black members of Congress. Indeed, she asserts that the disproportionate attention that black members of Congress give to racial issues often diminishes their performance as representatives. Moreover, Swain claims that black members of Congress often pursue goals in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena to distract their constituents from focusing on the fact that they lack efficacy within the institution.21

As I show in this book, linked fate does indeed play a very important role in the motivations of black politicians and activists as they navigate the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. And there is also evidence that the paternalism of members of the black elite did sometimes put them at odds with their constituents. For the most part, however, it is clear that black politicians and activists always tried very hard to deliver the best representation possible to their constituents. Thus, there is no evidence to substantiate claims that the black elite were or are aloof to the concerns of the rank-and-file.

That black leaders tried very hard to stay in line with the preferences of their constituents in the latter half of the twentieth century gives us some basis for speculating about the future of Pan-Africanism. The stark decline in the black elite’s engagement with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa since the late 1980s has prompted several scholars to argue that Pan-Africanism is a moribund ideology.22 Indeed, I myself have argued in one such piece that deracialization is the future of Pan-Africanism.23

The baseline assumption driving this prediction is that the relatively low level of engagement with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa by the black masses since the Free South Africa Movement means that there is little pressure on black leaders to act in this field.24 Moreover, because the black elite are now fully incorporated in U.S. political institutions, they no longer have to pursue their agendas through strategies designed to generate second-image effects. Indeed, the CBC is now an institutionalized power bloc within the House of Representatives, and its members have considerable individual and collective resources at their disposal.

Despite all this, a few black members of Congress continue to emerge as regular champions of African interests in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Like Diggs, Dellums, and the other members of the CBC who kept the sanctions issue alive in the House of Representatives after the Byrd Amendment, these men and women conform to Fenno’s classic conception of the policy wonk, found in his famous work on the motivations of members of Congress.25 It is clear, however, that these CBC opinion leaders on Africa are in the minority. Indeed, since the passage of the AGOA in the 106th Congress, the average proportion of CBC members sponsoring at least one substantive bill about U.S. relations with Africa has hovered around 6 percent per two-year session.

What may ultimately reverse this trend is the steady influx of immigrants from Africa into majority-minority congressional districts.26 As these groups grow and mobilize within these districts, we can expect them to demand that their homeland issues become a greater part of the legislative portfolios of their black representatives to Congress. Of course, there is also the possibility that African immigrants will follow the path of their Afro-Caribbean counterparts in the New York 11th Congressional District and use their burgeoning numbers to compete with native-born blacks for control of these districts.27 Regardless of the outcomes of these potential competitions, we can expect them to increase the volume of legislative activity around issues in U.S. relations with Africa.

One question looms large here, as at the end of every social science study: How generalizable or portable are these theoretical claims? The case of black Americans is exceptional in many ways. Instead of arising from the free choices of people seeking to better their life chances, the black diaspora was created through the forced migration of African peoples from the continent of their ancestry. Moreover, blacks were the only diaspora group whose ancestral heritage was used as a tool to press them into a system of chattel slavery in the United States. For many scholars working across disciplinary boundaries, these facts are enough to justify the development of distinct theoretical paradigms to explain trajectories in the experience of black Americans.

Although I am sympathetic to this approach in some instances, I do not believe that it is appropriate when theorizing about transnationalism. On the contrary, I believe that much of my theoretical perspective can be extended beyond the black case to apply to other ethnic and racial groups that have attempted to influence U.S. foreign policies toward their ancestral homelands. This is so because such groups share with blacks two fundamental realities of life in America: that survival in the United States, at least politically, is predicated on the successful completion of a period of assimilation and that, because of the nature of U.S. political institutions, all minority groups remain powerless to unilaterally generate outcomes in the foreign policymaking arena.

The black experience is exceptional because the period of assimilation has been longer and filled with more obstacles than those of just about every other ethnic and racial group that has entered the United States from foreign shores. Despite this, as we have seen, blacks quickly formed bonds of attachment to the United States and adopted the democratic ideology of the founders as their political creed. Building on the work of scholars such as Sheldon Stryker and Michael Dawson, I suggest that these bonds of attachment (or identity salience) grew primarily out of the social relationships that blacks maintained with others living in close proximity to them and the experiences that they shared as a community.28

Although blacks never forgot their African heritage, the affective ties that they formed to the United States clearly superseded their primordial ties to Africa. If black Americans could form such strong ties to the United States during their systematic exclusion from the polity, then why should it to be any different for groups created largely through the free choices of immigrants seeking to better their life chances? In my view, we should expect similar dynamics to be at work with other groups.