Commentary: Resetting U.S.- Africa relations could divide the African Diaspora

By Michael Walsh

Within the U.S. Technique towards Sub-Saharan Africa, the Biden Administration declares that the engagement of the African diaspora is a precedence exercise for resetting relations with sovereign states throughout the area. 

From a philosophical perspective, this raises necessary ontological and epistemological questions on what the African diaspora is and the way that social reality got here into being. At first look, it’d seem that the nationwide technique gives the solutions to those questions. The written textual content explicitly declares that the African diaspora consists of African People who descended from enslaved Africans in addition to African immigrants who didn’t. Nonetheless, this illustration of actuality doesn’t present solutions to the above questions. It merely gives clues for additional inquiry. Written texts can’t change actuality on their very own. What is said by the pen nonetheless have to be accepted by the folks. To reply these questions, we must wait and see how American policymakers discuss concerning the African diaspora within the context of regional relations. These revelations will take time.

Within the interim, we must always ask ourselves why American policymakers suppose that the African diaspora is one thing of worth within the context of regional relations. Right here, we might have to mark an evaluative distinction between the previous and new diasporas. 

The nationwide technique means that African immigrants are precious as a result of they’re “among the many most educated and affluent communities in the US.” Nonetheless, it makes no comparable declaration for the worth of African People who descended from enslaved Africans. Such silence is deafening. 

This raises a few follow-on questions. Does the Biden Administration suppose that the brand new diaspora is extra precious than the previous one on this context? In that case, does it additionally suppose that they need to have completely different units of duties, rights, obligations, necessities, authorizations, and permissions arising on this context. From a coverage perspective, the solutions to those questions matter since society is ordered by such deontic powers. 

Michael Walsh is an adjunct fellow of the Middle for African Research at Howard College.

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