ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to identify the assumptions and expectations and to see if they significantly affect or have affected African Americans in senior positions in the UN in the execution, interpretation, or evaluation of their responsibilities. The United Nations is composed of blocks of disunited nations separated by histories of cultural and economic inequality and held together in blocks by common histories, overlapping cultures and shared economic interests. Susan Rice is the first African American ambassador to the UN to be born in the period of desegregation and to mature in a period when racial barriers to mobility would finally dissolve at door of the White House. While South Africa's human rights violations were increasingly drawing international attention, Namibia's instability in the midst of its continuing colonial subjugation, was ripe for UN intervention in the spirit of democratization.
