What even serious individuals must note is that 40 or 50 years ago, the kind of jobs that illegal immigrants migrate towards today are the same positions that African Americans were relegated to. How else can we explain highly educated African Americans, even some with Ph.D's, being forced to work at the post office or as a hotel waiter. The barriers for African Americans were Jim Crow; for Hispanics or Latinos fleeing Mexico, El Salvador, Guatamala or other South American countries, it is the wretched poverty in those countries. For them, such jobs are a "step up" from what they had to accept in their country.
This essay focuses on James Weldon Johnson's overlapping literary and diplomatic careers. Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, written while he worked as a US consul in Latin America, draws upon tropes of international representation to weigh in upon questions of aesthetic and racial representation. Tracing Johnson's transition from a US representative abroad to a race representative within the US, the essay argues that Johnson's case illustrates the importance of permitting the significant tradition of black work in the US's diplomatic program to inform the ways we approach African America's expressive and geopolitical engagements with the international world.
