Marc,
It is really hard for me to refrain from teasing you about being a 20-something bachelor who is both opposed to abstinence-until-marriage as a public policy and suspicious of it as a human possibility. But I won’t go there.
There is no doubt that Bush’s policy in Africa is rooted in old assumptions about the hypersexuality of "native peoples" who must be civilized through missionary imperialism. Nation making and sex have been intimately linked for two centuries. Controlling the fertility and sexual practices of colonized and enslaved peoples was key for generating wealth for the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Americans.
But let’s be clear. This is not philanthropy; this is government aid. Bush is not acting as a wealthy, committed private citizen. Those 30 million dollars do not belong to Bush. They belong to us. They are our tax dollars. That means that we are implicated in the evil. We cannot simply wash our hands of and shake our heads at Bush’s African policies.
Black communities must stretch beyond a limited, parochial sense of what constitutes our interests. Now is the time for a more holistic, Diasporic politics that can mobilize against destructive policy like Bush’s determination to intervene in African sexual practices and equal determination not to intervene in Sudanese genocide.
Black Americans should be the domestic opinion leaders on Kenya, Somalia, sub-Saharan HIV-AIDS, and Darfur. Instead we are largely silent. Not even condoms can save us from apathy.
Melissa
