The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations

• Published in: Millennium Vol. 29; no. 2; pp. 331 - 356
• Main Author: Vitalis, Robert
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.01.2000; London School of Economics
• Subjects: Expansionism; Humanitarian intervention; Ideology; International Relations; International relations theory; Political Ideologies; Race; Racism; Sociological theory; Theoretical Problems; U.S.A; United States of America
• ISSN: 0305-8298; 1477-9021
• DOI: 10.1177/03058298000290020701

Toni Morrison argues that a highly & historically racialized US culture today exhibits a powerful tendency toward "silence & evasion" in matters of race. I examine the effect of this "norm against noticing" on American international relations theory. IR theory, although increasingly concerned with the origins of international institutions, the power of norms, & the origins & course of American empire & hegemony, has had virtually nothing to say about the impact of racial ideology in the construction of the modern world order. I subject various currents in American scholarship to critique & revision in theoretical & empirically oriented idioms in the course of revealing some of the "struts & bolts" of racism as an international institution. I draw attention to three kinds of practices: (1) the caste distinctions on which so called humanitarian interventions historically depended & still depend; (2) "strategic" white supremacist rationales on which opposition to US expansionism once rested; & (3) the system of American apartheid (Jim Crow), which was exported from the US to the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, & Asia as expansionism gained new ground at the turn-of-the-century. Adapted from the source document.