When Feeling American Requires Leaving America

As the U.S. once again wrestles—or attempts to avoid wrestling—with a legacy of racism and systematic discrimination, it’s instructive to reflect on this unique world, and the circumstances in which those who have been marginalized both feel truly American and best represent America. What can we learn from their experiences, and what is lost when they are turned away?

“It is only when I am overseas that I am truly and fully American,” Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, the first woman to oversee the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a former ambassador to Malta, told me. “When I am in the Middle East or in Asia or even in Europe, I am seen as nothing but a U.S. diplomat.”

Were she to be identified by an unmarked photograph, Abercrombie-Winstanley said she could pass for North African or even Yemeni. “Until,” she told me, chuckling, “you see me move or open my mouth, and then you know I am American.” Though Abercrombie-Winstanley cautioned that not “everything was easy peasy, because racial and gender discrimination happens all over the world,” she nevertheless talked about that particular American exceptionalism that has always been both envied and mocked. She described it to me as “an exuberant profile and that Americanness, which is the same whether you’re white, Black, brown, or whatever.”

Yet it is precisely that point—that Abercrombie-Winstanley acknowledges she could “look” as though she is from elsewhere, but is the face of her nation abroad—that illustrates the tension inherent in the American diplomatic corps.

Read: How did we get here?

Much of a mid-career diplomat’s most visible work involves grip-and-grin photo opportunities with political counterparts or simply showing up to a D-Day commemoration. But these more mundane aspects of the job—being that face—underscore parts of the work that hold significant meaning. In France, former Ambassador Shirley Barnes remembers honoring World War II veterans during her time as the consul general in Strasbourg. “The French never saw me as a Black American but as the person the U.S. government had sent to represent its country.”

Perhaps even more confounding, then, is that the State Department has often failed to understand or embrace opportunities to meaningfully diversify its ranks, especially when it comes to Black women.

The first Black American to serve in the Foreign Service was Clifton Wharton, who joined in 1925, but he remained the U.S.’s only Black diplomat for the next 20 years. By 1949, just four other Black men had entered the Foreign Service. This disparity was even greater for Black women. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Patricia Harris, a non-career official, as the U.S. envoy to Luxembourg, making her the first Black woman to become an American ambassador. It took another 25 years for Aurelia Brazeal to become the first Black female career diplomat to become an ambassador, when George H. W. Bush nominated her in 1990 to represent the U.S. before the Federated States of Micronesia. She went on to become ambassador to Kenya and Ethiopia.