White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations

by Robert Vitalis

Overview

"Defying his discipline's preference for theory over history, Vitalis has demonstrated how detailed, archive-based historical accounts can lift the veil on the racism running through international relations as field and practice."― Carol Polsgrove ― American Historical Review

Racism and imperialism are the twin forces that propelled the course of the United States in the world in the early twentieth century and in turn affected the way that diplomatic history and international relations were taught and understood in the American academy. Evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, and racial anthropology had been dominant doctrines in international relations from its beginnings; racist attitudes informed research priorities and were embedded in newly formed professional organizations. 

In White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.

Within the rigidly segregated profession, the "Howard School of International Relations" represented the most important center of opposition to racism and the focal point for theorizing feasible alternatives to dependency and domination for Africans and African Americans through the early 1960s. Vitalis pairs the contributions of white and black scholars to reconstitute forgotten historical dialogues and show the critical role played by race in the formation of international relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501701870
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	12/09/2015
Series:	The United States in the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	728,575
File size:	847 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Vitalis is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier and When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt and coeditor of Counter-Narratives: History, Society and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Mongrel American Social SciencePart I. The Noble Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development1. Empire by Association2. Race ChildrenPart II. Worlds of Color3. Storm Centers of Political Theory and Practice4. Imperialism and Internationalism in the 1920sPart III. The North versus the Black Atlantic5. Making the World Safe for "Minorities"6. The Philanthropy of MastersPart IV. "The Dark World Goes Free"7. The First but Not Last Crisis of a Cold War Profession8. Hands of Ethiopia9. The Fate of the Howard SchoolConclusion: The High Plane of Dignity and DisciplineNotes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Julian Go

The study of international relations was not born to promote peace among equal states but rather to help ensure racial subjugation on a global scale. This is the startling, bold, and persuasive argument of Robert Vitalis's White World Order, Black Power Politics. This is a book that anyone interested in race relations, international relations, and empire will need to read, and they will all thank Vitalis for daring to write it.

Lisa Anderson

A revelation, a provocation, and an inspiration, White World Order, Black Power Politics is required reading for everyone who studies, teaches, or practices international relations in the United States. In reconstructing a lost history of the impact of race and racism in the American study and practice of international relations, Robert Vitalis exposes congenital deformations in the field all the more grave for being invisible and ensures that we will never look at what we do the same way again.

Duncan Bell

White World Order, Black Power Politics is a groundbreaking book that has the potential to transform our understanding of a key dimension of twentieth-century American social science. It also contains important, albeit uncomfortable, lessons for contemporary scholars of international politics. Drawing on a vast range of primary sources, Robert Vitalis demonstrates that from the origins of the field until deep into the Cold War, IR helped to serve the interests of the imperial powers and provided an intellectual rationale for the claims of global white supremacy. But this didn't go unchallenged, and he performs an equally important service by drawing attention to the 'Howard School' of IR, a group of remarkable African American scholars who provided the only sustained source of resistance to the racial and imperial pretensions of the field.

Award Citation

This landmark book provides a superbly well-researched history of the racist underpinnings and practices of International Relations as it first emerged in the United States, and across the Atlantic. Its core analyses – sustained through a detailed recounting of the arguments and politics of individual scholars, philanthropists, and the then nascent funding institutions and think tanks - challenge and serve to demystify the mythology of IR as a field of interstate relations. The discipline was established first and foremost to analyze interracial relations and the sustenance of white supremacy. White World Order, Black Power Politics shows how IR, like many social and historical sciences, responded to the imagined imperatives of racial and colonial management. Moreover, the book excavates the hidden history of American IR by bringing to light the contributions to the study of world politics of a group of extraordinary African American scholars, who collectively Vitalis calls the 'Howard School of international relations theory': Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, and Eric Williams, alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, worked to resist these racist premises and imperial imperatives between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Their struggles reveal not only IR's white supremacist origins, but also why this past may not have yet been surpassed. An intellectual and historical tour de force.

Editorial Reviews

Defying his discipline's preference for theory over history, Vitalis has demonstrated how detailed, archive-based historical accounts can lift the veil on the racism running through international relations as field and practice.

Carol Polsgroven Historical Review

The book stands out for how it critiques how institutions reproduce, often in an unconscious manner, the foundational assumptions of an academic discipline.... Vitalis has also contributed to the vibrant and expanding scholarly study of radical Black transnational intellectual history by engaging with a largely-overlooked dimension of the work of important figures in the history of Black radical thought such as Locke, Williams and Bunche, showing how those thinkers worked within and against formal academic structures to criticize the racist and imperialist dynamics of international relations scholarship.

National Polticial Science Review

There is much to commend in Vitalis' book which is filled with fascinating vignettes and unexpected connections. He writes with clarity and passion, especially in the book's opening and close, to ensure that whilst ample room is given for the reader to make their own way through the material, it is never an aimless wander.

Journal of Historical Geography - Jake Hodder

Robert Vitalis wants his discipline to understand not only how central the category of race and the structures of racism were to its founding institutions and paradigms but also to see the erasure of that history not as progress but as repression, a willful forgetting that has if anything made it less equipped to comprehend (much less to address) the shocking racial inequities that still mark both the American and the global order. If international relations scholars want to understand the racial politics that made their field what it is today, there is no better place to begin than with this righteously angry book.

London Review of Books - Susan Pederson

Defying his discipline's preference for theory over history, Vitalis has demonstrated how detailed, archive-based historical accounts can lift the veil on the racism running through international relations as field and practice.

--Carol Polsgrove "American Historical Review"

Robert Vitalis wants his discipline to understand not only how central the category of race and the structures of racism were to its founding institutions and paradigms but also to see the erasure of that history not as progress but as repression, a willful forgetting that has if anything made it less equipped to comprehend (much less to address) the shocking racial inequities that still mark both the American and the global order. If international relations scholars want to understand the racial politics that made their field what it is today, there is no better place to begin than with this righteously angry book.

--Susan Pederson "London Review of Books"

The book stands out for how it critiques how institutions reproduce, often in an unconscious manner, the foundational assumptions of an academic discipline.... Vitalis has also contributed to the vibrant and expanding scholarly study of radical Black transnational intellectual history by engaging with a largely-overlooked dimension of the work of important figures in the history of Black radical thought such as Locke, Williams and Bunche, showing how those thinkers worked within and against formal academic structures to criticize the racist and imperialist dynamics of international relations scholarship.

-- "National Polticial Science Review"

There is much to commend in Vitalis' book which is filled with fascinating vignettes and unexpected connections. He writes with clarity and passion, especially in the book's opening and close, to ensure that whilst ample room is given for the reader to make their own way through the material, it is never an aimless wander.

--Jake Hodder "Journal of Historical Geography"

From the Publisher

Defying his discipline's preference for theory over history, Vitalis has demonstrated how detailed, archive-based historical accounts can lift the veil on the racism running through international relations as field and practice.

American Historical Review - Carol Polsgrove

"This landmark book provides a superbly well-researched history of the racist underpinnings and practices of International Relations as it first emerged in the United States, and across the Atlantic. Its core analyses – sustained through a detailed recounting of the arguments and politics of individual scholars, philanthropists, and the then nascent funding institutions and think tanks - challenge and serve to demystify the mythology of IR as a field of interstate relations. The discipline was established first and foremost to analyze interracial relations and the sustenance of white supremacy. White World Order, Black Power Politics shows how IR, like many social and historical sciences, responded to the imagined imperatives of racial and colonial management. Moreover, the book excavates the hidden history of American IR by bringing to light the contributions to the study of world politics of a group of extraordinary African American scholars, who collectively Vitalis calls the 'Howard School of international relations theory': Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, and Eric Williams, alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, worked to resist these racist premises and imperial imperatives between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Their struggles reveal not only IR's white supremacist origins, but also why this past may not have yet been surpassed. An intellectual and historical tour de force."

Award Citation

"The study of international relations was not born to promote peace among equal states but rather to help ensure racial subjugation on a global scale. This is the startling, bold, and persuasive argument of Robert Vitalis's White World Order, Black Power Politics. This is a book that anyone interested in race relations, international relations, and empire will need to read, and they will all thank Vitalis for daring to write it."

Julian Go

"A revelation, a provocation, and an inspiration, White World Order, Black Power Politics is required reading for everyone who studies, teaches, or practices international relations in the United States. In reconstructing a lost history of the impact of race and racism in the American study and practice of international relations, Robert Vitalis exposes congenital deformations in the field all the more grave for being invisible and ensures that we will never look at what we do the same way again."

Lisa Anderson

"White World Order, Black Power Politics is a groundbreaking book that has the potential to transform our understanding of a key dimension of twentieth-century American social science. It also contains important, albeit uncomfortable, lessons for contemporary scholars of international politics. Drawing on a vast range of primary sources, Robert Vitalis demonstrates that from the origins of the field until deep into the Cold War, IR helped to serve the interests of the imperial powers and provided an intellectual rationale for the claims of global white supremacy. But this didn't go unchallenged, and he performs an equally important service by drawing attention to the 'Howard School' of IR, a group of remarkable African American scholars who provided the only sustained source of resistance to the racial and imperial pretensions of the field."

Duncan Bell