Why Africa is off-limits in the US presidential debates | openDemocracy

http://africandiasporaleaders.com/ With over one billion people, 54 countries and some of the fastest growing economies in the world, Africa should feature prominently in any foreign policy discussion. But in the 2016 US election season, African affairs have been deliberately marginalised. During the first two US presidential debates, the world’s second largest continent was barely mentioned, and filtered only through the racial and religious politics of ‘birther’ and Benghazi sound bites. The reason for this marginalisation is intimately linked to the legacy of the search terms “Obama and Kenya” and the clickbait of conspiracy theories which have proliferated about African affairs since 2008. Africa has been historically marginalised in US foreign policy and dominated by American idioms of crisis. Obama’s political rise fueled a new nativist ‘crisis’, which reimagined racist tropes from the past through right-wing critiques and conspiracies about the first African American preside
https://www.opendemocracy.net/matthew-carotenuto/why-africa-is-off-limits-in-us-presidential-debates