The graceful and generous liberal gesture: Making racism invisible in american international relations

Millenium

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 331-356

  Vitalis, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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EID: 24944548831     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298000290020701     Document Type: Article

References (139)

1. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, 'Address to the Nations of the World' in W.E.B Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890-1919, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 125.
2. Alfred Zimmern, The Third British Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 82.
3. Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Little Brown, 1957), 188.
4. Jeffrey Checkel, 'The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory', World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 324-48.
5. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 192.
6. Stanley Hoffmann, 'An American Social Science: International Relations', Daedalus 106, no. 4 (1977): 59.
7. Stanley Hoffmann, 'An American Social Science: International Relations', Daedalus 106, no. 4 (1977): 59. Ibid.
8. From Ralph Ellison, 'Going to the Territory', in Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), 126. The full quote reads 'Thus, in the underground of our unwritten history much of that which is ignored defies our inattention by continuing to grow and have consequences'.
9. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 9.
10. Ralph Ellison, 'Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity', in Shadow and Act (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994), 28.
11. See Shelly Fisher Fiskhkin, 'Interrogating "Whiteness", Complicating "Blackness": Remapping American Culture', in Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, ed. Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
12. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
13. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
14. and Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
15. '[T]he archaeology of political science sometimes indicates that what we might find upon close inspection is that it resembles 'hose other products which we are warned not to look too closely at in their makings (sausages and legislation), if we do not wish to become disillusioned about our enterprise'. John Gunnell quoting an unpublished paper by Gene Poschman in 'The Historiography of American Political Science', in The Development of Political Science: A Comparative Survey, eds. David Easton, John G. Gunnell, and Luigi Graziano (London: Routledge, 1991), 15.
16. Ralph Ellison said the same thing in 1970 about American history: 'so it is well that we keep in mind the fact that not all of American history is recorded, and in some ways we are fortunate that it isn't, for if it were, we might become so chagrined by the discrepancies which exist between our democratic ideals and our social reality that we'd soon lose heart'. See 'Going to the Territory', 123.
17. Hanes Walton Jr., Cheryl Miller, and Joseph McCormick II, 'Race and Political Science', in Political Science in History, eds. James Farr, John Dryzek, and Stephen Leonard (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1995), 145.
18. Toni Morrison, 'Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presences in American Literature', in Criticism and the Color Line, 24.
19. Toni Morrison, 'Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presences in American Literature', in Criticism and the Color Line, 24. Ibid.
20. See Frank Füredi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 1 emphasis added. As he notes, it is the 'silence' about the centrality of racist discourse and the mythology of 'color-blind' tradition of interpreting international relations that needs explicating.
21. As Fred Halliday recognises, realism had to 'detach itself from its cousins - social Darwinism, racism, and Machpolitik'. See Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994), 48.
22. Miles Kahler, following Brian Schmidt, has argued that the story conventionally told about the 'first' field-defining debate is a myth or invented tradition. He does not explain nearly as well why the field required one. See 'Inventing International Relations: International Relations Theory After 1945', in New Thinking in International Relations Theory, eds. Michael Doyle and John Ikenbeny (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
23. For the Cold War context and the end of white supremacy, see Mary Louise Dudziak, 'Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative', Stanford Law Review 41, no. 1 (1988): 61-120;
24. Brenda Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
25. Füredi, Silent War;
26. Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
27. and Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States 1941-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
28. Du Bois' account of Black Americans' strivings, 'to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture', is found in his Souls of Black Folk, reprinted in full in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 102.
29. 'The Vietnam experience, thus, can be said to have channelled the discipline into the mode in which it finds itself today...in which political scientists neither speak truth to power (they rarely have in the past) nor attempt to serve power in a way that may do some good...It is a mode in which theory is valued for the sake of theory, and empirical analysis is valued merely for the sake of filling knowledge gap(s). Regrettably, it might take another major international conflict to awaken the discipline from the intellectual torpor and the irrelevance that characterize it today'. See Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, unpublished book ms., 1998, 22.
30. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
31. Martha Finnemore, 'Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention', in The Culture of National Security, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
32. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
33. Peter J. Katzenstein, 'Introduction', in Cultures of National Security, 5.
34. George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), xi
35. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13-20;
36. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991);
37. and Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
38. Wilson's pronouncements are evidence in support of Roxanne Doty's key point about how 'practitioners of statecraft are ardently and continuously involved in the construction of the nation'. See Roxanne Doty, 'Sovereignty and the Nation: Constructing the Boundaries of National Identity', in State Sovereignty as Social Construct, eds. Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123.
39. 'For example, political scientists tend to slip into discussions of "sovereignty" or "slavery" as norms when in fact they are (or were) collections of norms and the mix of rules and practices that structure the institutions and varied significantly over time'. See Martha Finnemore and Katherine Sikkink, 'International Norm Dynamics and Political Change' (paper presented at the SSRC/MacArthur Conference on Ideas, Culture, and Political Analysis, Princeton University, 15-16 May 1998, 7.
40. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
41. See also Adolph Reed Jr., 'The New Victorians', The Progressive 58, no. 2 (1994): 20.
42. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward and Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken, 1968), 152-53.
43. Marc Trachtenberg, 'Intervention in Historical Perspective', in Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention, eds. Laura Reed and Carl Kaysen (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993), 24.
44. I do not meant to endorse this particular claim. The work of Jeffry Frieden, Simon Bromley, Greg Nowell and many other historians and political economists underscore the degree to which the equation of 'national interest' with the fate of particular investors, firms, and settler communities became less obvious to policymakers over time in the era of anti-interventionist mass publics, regions, and sectoral competitors.
45. Finnemore, 'Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention', 172.
46. Finnemore, ' Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention', Ibid., 170.
47. Charles Mills, 'Dark Ontologies: Blacks, Jews and White Supremacy', in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 70-71.
48. My debt to Smith, Civic Ideals, in this formulation is obvious.
49. Ibid., 9.
50. From Du Bois, 'The Future of Africa - A Platform'
51. quoted in Adolph Reed Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79.
52. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 111-19.
53. See Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24;
54. Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 35-37, 41-42;
55. and for the positive description of Morel see Victor Kieman, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age (London: Serif, 1995), 234 .
56. For white supremacist conceptions of 'native rights' in the interwar period, more generally, see Füredi, Silent War, 88-100 .
57. On the one hand, the 'abolition of slavery and the slave trade...was an essential part of the universalization of "humanity"...Human beings previously viewed as beyond the edge of humanity - as, in fact, property - came to be viewed as human, and with that status came certain, albeit minimal, privileges and protections'. On the other hand, '[s]lavery and slaveholding themselves did not provoke the same reaction as Ottoman abuse of Christians did. This may be because the perpetrators of the humanitarian violations were "civilized" Christian nations...Another reason was probably that the targets of these humanitarian violations were black Africans, not "fellow Christians" or "brother Slavs"...Abuse of Africans did not merit military intervention inside another state'. See Finnemore, 'Constructing Norms', 170-72.
58. See Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), 49-50.
59. 'There is a tendency in the recent work to consider only ethically good norms...Some constructivists are aware of this problem but future work must address it. It will not only protect these scholars from getting caricatured as peaceniks by theoretical opponents, but it will also direct their attention to important unexplored issues such as the role of social construction in ethnic conflict and war'. See Checkel, 'Constructivist Turn', 339.
60. See Paul Kowert and Jeffery Legro, 'Norms, Identities, and their Limits', in Culture of National Security, 486-87.
61. '[E]mpire turns on their heads the central insights of international relations theorists. Imperialism's foundation is not anarchy, but order, albeit an order imposed and strained'. See Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 11.
62. Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
63. See Farced Zakaria, 'Realism and Domestic Polities', International Security 17, no. 1 (1992): 177-98. Zakaria argues, compellingly, that Snyder cannot logically explain 'failure' or 'success' of an expansionist project - a 'systemic outcome' - through an analysis focused primarily on domestic politics. It is sufficient for our purposes to note that Zakaria concedes that domestic politics matters in any adequate explanation of where and how states 'attempt' to expand .
64. For more on this aspect of Snyder, see Katzenstein, 'Introduction', in Culture of National Security, 27.
65. For the foundational texts and arguments of the revisionist historiography school and the turn taken since in the debate about ideas and interests in the process of expansionism, begin with Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
66. For the 'contextual' account of the historiographical disputes of the 1960s, see Novick, Noble Dream, 445-57.
67. Eric Tyrone Lowrey Love, 'Race Over Empire: Racism and United States Imperialism, 1865-1900' (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1997), 7.
68. See Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68-75.
69. Trubowitz underscores the degree to which white supremacism set the terms for all sides in the 'great debate' over the direction of fin de siécle America's political economy. The argument about the racism of the agrarian, populist, democratic party, and sectionalist-based oppositions that comprised the anti-imperialist coalition can be traced back to Christopher Lasch, 'The Antiimperialists, the Philippines and the Inequality of Man', Journal of Southern History 24, no. 3 (1958):319-31.
70. See Mattew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 205-13.
71. Jesse Grant, In the Days of My Father General Grant (New York: Harper Brothers, 1925), 138,
72. as cited in Love, 'Race Over Empire', 77.
73. See Love, 'Race Over Empire', 77.
74. Love, ' Race Over Empire', 77. Ibid.
75. Smith, Civic Ideals, 410-69.
76. Robert Vitalis, 'How American International Relations Became White', forthcoming; Brian Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 72;
77. and N.G. Franklin, 'Knowledge for Empire: Academics and Universities in the Service of Imperialism', in On Cultural Ground: Essays in International History, ed. Robert David Johnson (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1994), 123-46.
78. See Charles Lilley and Michael Hunt, 'On Social History, the State, and Foreign Relations', Diplomatic History 11, no. 3 (1987): 243-50;
79. Edward Crapol, 'Coming to Terms with Empire: The Historiography of Late-Nineteenth Century American Foreign Relations', Diplomatic History 16, no. 4 (1992): 573-97;
80. Robert Vitalis, 'Crossing Exceptionalism's Frontiers to Discover America's Kingdom', Arab Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (1998): 10-31;
81. Paul Kramer, 'The Pragmatic Empire: U.S. Anthropology and Colonial Politics in the Occupied Philippines, 1898-1916', (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, June 1998), 369-85.
82. Kramer, 'Pragmatic Empire', 370.
83. See Doyle, Empires, 11.
84. For a broader view of where empire and world politics are being studied, and an argument about the 'reciprocal interanimations of US cultures and US imperialism', see Donald E. Pease, 'New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism', in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23.
85. See James LeRoy, 'Race Prejudice in the Philippines', Atlantic Monthly 56 (July 1902): 100.
86. My discussion of LeRoy draws on Kramer, 'Pragmatic Empire', 151-55.
87. Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 66.
88. As stated in Article III of Hay-Bunau Varilla Convention, see LaFeber, Panama Canal, 29-39, 42-46, 52-57, 66-79.
89. See also Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 19-40, 63-83.
90. Raymond Leslie Buell, 'Panama and the United States' as cited in LaFeber, Panama Canal, 68.
91. Reagan's comments are cited in LaFeber, Panama Canal, 190.
92. Conniff, Panama and the United States, 71-72, 74-77, 80-81, 84-85.
93. On the dismantling of the Panamanian army, see William McCain, The United States and the Republic of Panama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1937), 48-61.
94. McCain, United States, 97-104;
95. Paul Blanshard, Democracy and Empire in the Caribbean (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 239;
96. John and Mavis Biesanz, The People of Panama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 61-77;
97. and Herbert and Mary Knapp, Red, White, and Blue Paradise: The American Canal Zone in Panama (New York: Harcourt, 1984).
98. A. Grenfell Price, 'White Settlement in the Panama Canal Zone', Geographical Review 25, no. 1 (1935): 1-11.
99. My discussion in this paragraph depends on the remarkable archival work of Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).
100. See as well Elizabeth McClean Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor, 1850-1930 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988).
101. William R. Scott, The Americans in Panama (New York: Statler Publishing, 1912), 189. Wilson's program to enforce Jim Crow in the District of Columbia was still to come.
102. Conniff, Black Labor, 31-34. Conniff found records of canal managers' attempts at establishing guidelines for assignments to the rolls, which, since they were based on race, could not be published.
103. LaFeber, Panama Canal, 65.
104. See also Biesanz, People, 77-80.
105. Conniff, Black Labor, 4-5, 38-39.
106. Price, 'White Settlement', 1, 11.
107. Full documentation for the arguments made in this section can be found in Robert Vitalis, 'Aramco World: Business and Culture on the Arabian Oil Frontier', in The Modern Worlds of Business and Industry, ed. Karen Merrill (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1998), 3-25, and 'Crossing Exceptionalism's Frontiers'.
108. Cited in Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 183.
109. Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (1984), 183. Ibid.
110. David Niles, one of the president's advisors on Palestine, in a conversation with Harry Truman as quoted in Aaron David Miller, Search for Security: Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy 1939-1949 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 200.
111. For the political economy undergirding US-British rivalry in the region more generally see Robert Vitalis, 'The New Deal in Egypt: The Rise of Anglo-American Commercial Competition in World War II and the Fall of Neocolonialism', Diplomatic History 20, no. 2 (1996): 211-40.
112. On decolonisation, see Finnemore, 'Constructing Norms', 172-75; David Strang, 'From Dependency to Sovereignty: An Event History Analysis of Decolonization', American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 846-60;
113. and Neta Crawford, 'Decolonization as an International Norm: The Evolution of Practices, Arguments, and Beliefs', in Emerging Norms, 37-62.
114. '[W]e are going to be faced, one of these days, with the question of why we furnish the Americans with better free hosing than we do the Arabs'. See Aramco, Planning Committee, Meeting of January 5, 1944, 'Government, Public and Employee Relations Problems', 13, Box 3, Philip C. McConnell Papers, 1937-1963, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
115. Conniff, Black Labor, 6.
116. Aramco, Management Development Seminar, 6 March 1965, Dhahran, Folder 16, Box 5; and 'Notes by Mulligan', nd., Folder 57, Box 1, William E Mulligan Papers, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, DC.
117. On Gunnar Myrdal, see David Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of An American Dilemma, 1944-1969 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
118. Wendel Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943).
119. On Ruth Benedict, see Margaret Caffrey, Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
120. See Wallace Stegner, Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil (Beirut: Middle East Export Press, 1971), 173.
121. The phrase 'break in the world racial order' is the term sociologists Howard Winant and Gay Seidman use to describe the postwar period in an unpublished book prospectus [n.d.], which they allowed me to see.
122. Stegner, Discovery!, 173.
123. See Raymond Leslie Buell, International Relations, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1929). Schmidt and all other historians of IR have so far managed to avoid discussing what was the most important US textbook of the key decade of the 1920s, which opens with the classic trope of the discipline, a man on the moon looking down upon an earth divided 'into different hues'.
124. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois-Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 503-4.
125. In a similar way, Barrington Moore Jr. could ignore Du Bois study of reconstruction when writing Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, although it is now recognised as a fundamental influence on the historiographical revolution in the field since the 1970s. I am grateful to Howard Winant for the point about Moore. Winant is one of the handful of theorists today who take Du Bois as a starting point for analysing contemporary problems of world order. See most recently his 'Racial Dualism at Century's End', in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrains, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 87-115,
126. 'Constructing and Resisting the New World (Racial) Order', in Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America, ed. Chester Hartman (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997) and
127. 'Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Polities', New Left Review 225 (1997): 73-88.
128. Brian Porter, ed., The Abyerystwyth Papers: International Politics 1919-69 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972);
129. Hoffmann, 'An American Social Science'; William Olson and A.J.R. Groom International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation (London: Harper Collins, 1991);
130. and Schmidt, Political Discourse of Anarchy.
131. See Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder, eds., Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
132. Füredi, Silent War, 30-31.
133. 'The notion that political science in the United States might be distinctly American receives virtually no consideration' in professional discourse. See Oren, Our Enemies and US, 3.
134. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
135. Morrison, 'Home' in House That Race Built, 11.
136. For an account of how American political science manages unacceptable modes of thought and action see Timothy W. Luke, 'The Discipline as Disciplinary Normalization: Networks of Research', in Beyond Boundaries? Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies, eds. Rudra Sil and Eileen Doherty (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, in press).
137. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, chap. 4;
138. see as well, Smith, Civic Ideals, chap. 12 and epilogue.
139. Checkel, 'Constructivist Turn', 348.