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Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the ambassador who has suffered from racism twice

2021-02-27T16:40:19.054Z


The US representative at the UN is a veteran diplomat who experienced racial segregation in her youth and discrimination in her African destinations


Linda Thomas-Greenfield, after presenting her credentials as an ambassador to the UN, on February 25, 2021 in New York.Angela Weiss / AP

When Linda Thomas-Greenfield (Baker, Louisiana, 68 years old) entered the diplomatic career in 1982, there were years left for the presence of women and African Americans in the US foreign service.

She, who soon after would take over its general direction, with direct supervision of its 70,000 members, broke two barriers at the same time, as a woman and as a black woman, also originally from a humble people in the racist south, at the opposite of a profession with as much pedigree as diplomatic.

This is why he continues to encourage black students to join the ranks of the foreign service, sometimes to the point of getting into trouble, like the one he starred in in 2019 when he gave a talk to college students of color in Savannah, in the southern state of Georgia, when I was working for a private consulting firm.

The dissertation would not have gone down in history - or at the hands of its political detractors as ammunition - if the venue hadn't been the Confucius Institute, funded by the Chinese government on the mostly black campus of Savannah State University.

The institute has closed, but the echo of the talk has not stopped resounding, especially because it minimized Chinese penetration in Africa.

In the recent confirmation session before the Senate Foreign Committee - the position of ambassador to the UN is not ministerial, but the process must continue - Thomas-Greenfield was colored with that dissertation, of which he assured that he had been a mistake while promising firmness against Beijing.

“China is a strategic adversary and its actions threaten our security and our way of life.

China is a global threat, an evil force, "he stressed to reassure critics.

Thomas-Greenfield was finally confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday, with a comfortable majority.

Savannah's slip does not cloud a solid career, devoted to Africa, in several of whose countries, such as Kenya and Liberia, she has been an ambassador, and with forays into Washington, as head of the foreign service or

number two

of the Secretary of State for Affairs Africans.

But the achievements of the curriculum pale in front of the story of the self-made young woman who, in the midst of the struggle for civil rights in the segregationist south, was denied entry to her town's institute.

He was the first member of his family to finish high school, still segregated in 1970, and one of the few who left Baker behind in search of horizons.

She did so to study at Louisiana State University, and then Wisconsin State University in Madison, where a one-year scholarship to Liberia convinced her of the appeal of diplomacy.

Africa had crossed his path long before, by chance.

In the early 1960s, the Peace Corps, a federal agency promoting volunteerism "for the sake of world peace and friendship," according to its charter, opened a center in Baker to train volunteers for Somalia and Swaziland.

Thomas-Greenfield has often stated that the sight of those exotic beings, among explorers and missionaries, who also denounced segregation in local businesses, convinced her to want to be like them.

His destinations in Africa, the continent where he spent a whole decade, presented him with major challenges.

Perhaps the greatest was her experience in Rwanda in the 1994 genocide, when she traveled to the country from Kenya, where she was posted, to assess the refugee situation.

President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane had just been shot down and she, in a confusing incident, was held at gunpoint after being taken over by Tutsi, the ethnic group that put most of the dead in the carnage.

She came off well, but the mixture of fatigue, professional burnout and racism experienced in her own flesh - even as an ambassador - encouraged her to return to Washington.

"I think the reason I was mistaken for a Rwandan is because other countries, including many Africans, do not expect an American diplomat to be black," she told

The Washington Post

years ago

.

He landed in the Barack Obama Administration with clear ideas ("not to run from one crisis to another, but to think strategically ... how naive," he told the newspaper) but realpolitik prevailed, as always, and the world's newspapers exploded - like the Ebola crisis, which hit him squarely - they forced Thomas-Greenfield to solve, rather than think.

Nobody better trained for that tower of Babel often to the brawl that is the UN, or to show that the US is back on the international scene ... even if the ghost of China, and its right of veto, haunts it.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-02-27

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