Shades of sovereignty: racialized power, the United States

and the world

Paul A. Kramer

The segregated diners along Maryland’s Route 40 were always somebody’s

problem – mothers packing sandwiches for a daytrip to the nation’s capital, Jim
Crow on their minds – but they were not always John F. Kennedy’s problem. That
changed in the early 1960s, when African diplomats began arriving to the United
States to present their credentials to the United Nations and the White House.
Between the high-modernist universalism of the former and the neo-classical,
republican universalism of the latter, at just about the place where ambassadors
got hungry, lay a scattering of gaudy, ramshackle restaurants straddling an
otherwise bleak stretch of highway. As the motoring diplomats discovered to
their shock, the diners excluded black people in ways that turned out to be
global: whatever their importance to US foreign policy, African economic
ministers and cultural attaches received no diplomatic immunity.1
The incoming Kennedy administration soon confronted an international
scandal, as the officials filed formal complaints and US and overseas editors
ran with the story. “Human faces, black-skinned and white, angry words and a
humdrum reach of U. S. highway,” read an article in Life, “these are the raw
stuff of a conflict that reached far out from America in to the world.” Kennedy,
reluctant to engage the black freedom struggle except where it intersected with
Cold War concerns, established an Office of the Special Protocol Service to
mediate: its staff caught flak, spoke to newspapers, and sat down with Route
40’s restaurateurs, diner by diner, making the case that serving black people was
in the United States’ global interests. High-level officials argued for the
desegregating of Maryland’s public accommodations for both visiting
dignitaries and African Americans. “Let me say with a Georgia accent,”
stated Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “that we cannot solve this problem if it
requires a diplomatic passport to claim the rights of an American citizen.”2 In
the context of Cold War rivalry and African decolonization, Route 40’s petty
apartheid was no longer just its own. Racialized power had a geopolitics; one
that had suddenly brought the President to within two degrees of separation
from the owners of the Double-T Diner.3

245
246 Paul A. Kramer

This chapter explores intersections between the politics of racialized

difference and the United States’ geopolitical histories, and the rich varieties
of ways that historians have mapped them.4 The assertion that the United
States’ place in the world had something – perhaps everything – to do with
race would have been uncontroversial for those who dominated the nation’s
early political, economic, and social life: slave-based capitalist empire, the
displacement and elimination of Native peoples, and a sense of America’s
Anglo-Saxon roots and destinies were widely understood to be foundational
to and defining of the United States itself.5 Nor would this statement have
surprised Native and enslaved peoples who a paid high price for US national-
imperial expansion. From the mid-nineteenth century forward, it was the
activism and scholarship of the critics of racialized supremacy, both those
who suffered under it directly and their allies, who inaugurated the hard
work – still unfinished – of shifting race from essentialized, ontological reality
and moral norm to social construction and political problem. A rising, critical
consciousness developed of the ways that racial systems in the United States
formed an integral part of what W. E. B. Du Bois called a global belt of white
supremacies, sparked by transnational abolitionism, and intensifying in
particular where the expansion of a black public sphere and African
Americans’ increasingly worldly horizons challenged exploitative, aggressively
hierarchical European and US colonialisms at the turn of the twentieth century.6
By the early Cold War, a sense that the most egregious, visible, and terroristic
faces of the US racial state – if not racialized social inequality generally – were, in
an interconnected world, an international public relations problem in need of
technocratic management, had shifted from outsider politics to establishment
circles, including presidential administrations.
But this awareness – vibrant in activist networks, intellectual circles and the
black academy – was, for an extremely long time, segregated from the fortified
precincts of US diplomatic history. This was not so surprising. With its
Eurocentric, Atlanticist orientation, elite-centered methodologies, and
aspirational ties to the State Department (an agency with its own deep history
of exclusivity, including racial line-drawing), early diplomatic history
embarked from confident assumptions about global hierarchy that were
inhospitable, where they were not actively hostile, to critical accounts of that
hierarchy, including of its racialized dimensions.7 This said, there were early
works that, in recounting the history of US–Japan relations and the centrality of
struggles over migration to those relations, necessarily emphasized the politics
of racialized exclusion at their center; while important foundations, these works
did not establish race as an analytic category more widely.8
By contrast, mid-to-late twentieth-century scholarship in the history of US
foreign relations witnessed a variety of dramatic openings when it came to the
role of race.9 They were ushered in, first and foremost, by activists and intellectuals
during the Vietnam War era that linked anti-racism and anti-imperialism, and
critiques of American power to anti-colonial struggles throughout the world.10 In
Racialized power 247

the long wake of these struggles, late twentieth-century historians of the United
States’ role in the world began stressing the role of “nonstate” actors (including
anti-racist activists); the social-historical experiences of groups that had, up to
then, been marginalized within diplomatic historiography, especially African
Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans; and culturalist methods that, in their
late twentieth-century modes, foregrounded questions of meaning, identity, and
power. Given the centrality of the Cold War to US foreign relations historiography,
and African Americans to the study of race in the United States, it made sense that
the foundational works connecting race and diplomatic history established the fact
of Jim Crow as an international embarrassment in the post-1945 period, and black
and anti-racist activists’ varied uses of this reality, revelations that were bold and of
enduring impact. Especially since historians’ discovery of this “Cold War civil
rights” nexus, race has (against long odds) emerged as a major analytic category in
US foreign relations historiography, figuring both in works that foreground it and,
just as importantly, in scholarship with fundamental concerns that lie elsewhere.11
Specifically, this chapter will discuss eight domains of scholarship, among
many possible others: histories treating the racializing of sovereignty;
policymakers’ approaches to race; race in cultural histories of American
perceptions of the world; the making of transnational racial solidarities;
transfers of racial and anti-racial practices; the racial politics of migration and
border control; intersections of race and capitalism; and race in US militarization,
war-making, and occupation. This chapter’s title has two intended implications.
First, “shades” suggests the ways that the racialized politics of social
differentiation were and are, to important degrees, reflections of – shadows cast
by – conflicts over geopolitical questions: who legitimately governed whom, by
what means, in the name of what principles, and toward what ends; about the
meanings of nationhood and statehood in a globalizing world; and about
definitions of and boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence.
While conventional historiographic approaches have plausibly prioritized the
causal power of race in shaping American geopolitics – particularly as the
impetus, template or ready-made rationale for imperial projects – my approach
here takes seriously the equally plausible but less explored proposition that
struggles over the United States’ presence and power in the world, unfolding in
transnational, imperial, and global contexts, played decisive roles in shaping
Americans’ notions of racialized difference and its political meanings.
Second, “shades” is meant to evoke degrees, gradations, and variations, as an
explicit challenge to stark, counter-productive dichotomies that characterize
literatures on both race (white/non-white, racism/anti-racism, racial/civic,
exclusion/inclusion) and US foreign relations history (realism/idealism, culture/
power, domestic/foreign, empire/democracy). The most generative literature in
this field, I’ll suggest, exposes the limits of these binaries by looking at the varied,
evolving, and conflicting ways that Americans have made sense of their
transnational encounters, including in racialized ways; the wide array of US
248 Paul A. Kramer

geopolitical projects Americans have engaged in, and the complex, multi-
directional ways these histories inform each other.
To begin, the chapter attends to some necessary definitional work. Both
despite and because of decades of struggle, race remains hard to pin down.12
Discussions of race have long been characterized by imprecise, essentializing
definitions and intense, moral-political charge – themselves related – as well as
identitarian criteria for participation, but more than anything else, by the
overwhelming ideological need to cast race as liberalism’s other, whatever else
it may be: in the case of the United States, at least, a language of “dilemmas” and
“contradictions” has long rendered antithetical things that are not, in fact,
opposites. In these classic, liberal formulations, race is contrary or external to
the ordinary operations of capitalist social relations and national civic
membership, and will wither with the advance of their universalizing logics.
This fundamental role as negation may be precisely what has given race its
expansive, indefinite character; other categories – class and empire come to
mind – play similar roles as liberalism’s fraught but defining outer limits. It does
not help race’s clarity that essentializing meanings of the term (as natural,
hierarchical typology) and deconstructing ones (as socio-political construct)
share the same word, unlike the generative distinction between “gender” and
“sex,” for example. When invoked without specificity in the context of
terminological confusion and conflictual politics, the term “race” can
essentialize the very people and situations it is meant to account for (similar
to the way early twentieth-century Americans used the adjective “race” to
modify only those things pertaining to African Americans).
Equally unhelpful is the unselfconscious hegemony of US-based, Anglophone
framings. Due to the relative power and resources of the US academy and
publishing in a more and more Anglophone world, and the decisive,
transnational impact of the African American freedom struggles during and
after the Cold War (itself inseparable from the United States’ status as
hegemon), American ways of theorizing US-centered racialized systems have
become powerful templates for “race” in many other scholarly and political
settings. In ways that remain to be fully explored – intended, unintended, ironic,
tragic, and productive – post-1945 American theorizations of race, essentialist
and anti-essentialist, hegemonic and liberatory, may be one of the United States’
most important American Century intellectual-political exports.13 These
conceptualizations, for better and worse, tend to take as their conscious and
unconscious object the American subjection of black people – often, more
narrowly, Jim Crow – physical criteria of racialized difference, and one-drop
rule delineations as defining not only of race in parts of the United States, or the
United States, but of “race” generally. While not without its benefits for both
scholarly inquiry and emancipation politics, this dynamic – running parallel to
Americans’ other conflations of nation and globe – expresses its own kind of
imperial provinciality. With these contending frameworks in play, it is worth
building a fresh historical account on an original conceptual foundation.
Racialized power 249

For my purposes, racialized power combines exception, descent, and

domination. This succinct definition requires unpacking. Race appears here as
a verb – something actors past and present do to each other – rather than a
noun; as noted above, race in the nominative form hovers uneasily between
essentialist and deconstructive tasks. That race modifies power here signals its
irreducibly political character: that it is forged and challenged in historical and
present-day struggles over power, whatever its proponents’ pretensions to
primordial history, scientific authority, divine will, or identitarian
authenticity. By exception, it refers not only to exceptionalism in an
ideological sense (the notion that certain “races” may be positively or
negatively exceptional vis-à-vis a norm, for example) but to extraordinary
exercises of dominating power and the absence or suspension of rights; these
political exceptions are neither separable nor derivable from exceptionalist
ideologies. Unlike conventional US-centric definitions that foreground
physical criteria – often explicitly scientized – the definition presented here
emphasizes distinctions of descent, definable through myriad authority
systems (religious, historical, kinship-based, scientific) but tied ultimately to
questions of reproduction, lineage, and historical continuity, and their
relationship to socio-political membership.14 It is for this reason, among
others, that racialized power and gendered power are inseparable: policing
and preserving lines of descent requires disciplining gender definitions and
sexual behaviors in ways that secure only sanctioned forms of biological and
social reproduction. While cultures of bodily differentiation were at the core of
slavery and its aftermaths in the Atlantic world, racialized power has been built
upon equally compelling distinctions of language, religion, region, occupation,
space, technology, and material culture. Finally, race as defined here involves
relations of asymmetrical power, power that was limited, among other factors,
by the resistance of those subjected to it. Where conventional definitions tend
toward a sharp typological distinction between race and its others (as in the
long-running debate about when race first emerged), one of the important
features of this definition is that, by employing race as a verb, it also renders it
both a process and a spectrum: something becomes racialized only to the extent
that the separable gears of exception, descent, and domination grind together.
I have built this definition in part to counter one of the most influential,
durable and misleading presumptions about “race” in scholarship and public
life: that it is reducible to ideational activity, “prejudice,” “ideology,” and
“racism” (understood as a coherent body of beliefs) being three of the most
common formulations. The notion that race is simply a matter of (bad) thinking
is an old one, dating back at least to the 1920s, and became dominant during the
post-1945 period for complex reasons, among them the rise of culturalist
thought and survey metrics of “attitude” in the social and human sciences,
and the driven, Cold War pursuit of anti-materialist, anti-socialist theories that
could displace what for many were compelling accounts of race’s profound,
structural ties to capitalism. What might be called the mentalizing of race
250 Paul A. Kramer

requires a deeper history than is possible here.15 What is most relevant for
present purposes is that in part because of this association with “ideas,” race
entered the historiography of US foreign relations understood to be a subset of
“culturalist” approaches. While this fact promoted a rich literature on the role
of racialized ideology in US foreign relations, it reinforced a misunderstanding
of race as primarily or exclusively a matter of mind, rather than a mode of
power with material, behavioral, social-structural, institutional, and spatial
dimensions, alongside ideological ones.16 It also made race-focused
scholarship subject to some traditional diplomatic historians’ periodic,
revanchist longings to return to the time when their subjects’ meaning-making
and racialized enterprises could go uninvestigated. As they did with “culture” or
“ideas,” these historians asked whether race “mattered” by holding it to what
they took to be the stern test of “power,” defined narrowly: did race affect
“policy”?
While late twentieth-century historians of US foreign relations would
broaden the field’s animating questions beyond “policy,” they would also
provide a sharp reply to this dismissive inquiry, one sharp enough to
constitute a rebuke. When it came to US foreign policy, they demonstrated,
race had, indeed, mattered a great deal. From US policymakers’ pursuit of the
removal and elimination of Native Americans, to fears of a British abolitionist
presence in the United States’ slave-based empire, to long refusals to recognize
independent Haiti and Liberia, to the Anglo-Saxonism that framed and
rationalized continental and extra-continental empire-building, to Yellow
Peril fears of Japan’s empire and Pacific Coast migration in the early 20th
century, to resistance to multilateral institutions on the grounds of possible
interference with “domestic” institutions such as Jim Crow and immigration
restriction, to racialized wars of empire in Asia, from the Philippines to the
Pacific Islands and Japan to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, to the sense that
Soviet and Chinese communisms were sinister in part because of their “Asiatic”
roots, to concerns that extreme “domestic” expressions of racial hierarchy
would alienate a decolonizing world, to the exceptionalizing of Islam as
possessing inherent affinities with terrorist technique: in different ways, at
different moments, and with different degrees of intensity, racialized
distinction played a critical role in shaping US policymakers’ calculus of
interest, alliance, enmity, tactics, and strategy.17
The definition advanced here intends to move beyond the question of
whether a given historical phenomenon or process “was” race or not, toward
the question of how precisely it came to be racialized and/or deracialized.18
How did the politics of exception operate? Against what norm was exception
constructed? Was it that the dominant were exceptional, and subordinates
made the homogenized norm, or the other way around? What practical,
institutional, and policy expressions did exception take? How did the
excepted challenge their condition? What, if any, universals did they invoke
and organize around? What kinds of descent-lines mattered, and how did they
Racialized power 251

make themselves known? To what extent were inherited characteritics

understood to be malleable or fixed? By what mechanisms were they
understood to be transmitted across time? How and why did the racialized
embrace, transform, or reject these attributions? What kinds of asymmetrical
power did the workings of exception and descent authorize and organize? How
were subjects’ constructed peculiarities forged into arguments for domination,
and vice versa? How did those subjected to these regimes negotiate, internalize,
and resist them?
Most important for historians and most amenable to their expertise is the
question of change over time: how did projects in exception, descent and
domination shift, both separately and in their intersection? How did those
promoting and challenging them advance their cause, and with what success?
While often taken to be historically fixed (a possible conceptual spillover from
the notion of race as a form of fixed status), race was profoundly protean,
seizing upon socially and historically available distinctions and, in turn,
intensifying those distinctions by enlisting them for political purposes. Under
changing historical conditions – especially in the face of challenge –
constellations of exception, descent, and domination slid, snakelike, out of
their particular skins, living to strike another day.
In making sense of race’s historical multiplicities, it is useful to map specific
phenomena on a spectrum from what I will call absolutizing to civilizing modes
of power and differentiation. Both of these represent ideal types, unable to fully
capture the idiosyncracies of actual historical processes, but they are
nonetheless analytically useful. Absolutizing power spoke in a language of
fixity: individuals were assigned to single, all-encompassing social categories
defined by unchangeable features; social groups were seen as unable to alter
their fundamental characteristics; salient difference was grounded in
transcendence, especially in God or natural order. Political life was
understood to consist of irreconcilable, zero-sum conflict between something
approximating species. Absolutizing power’s defining dilemma was category
disruption, whether through transgressive sexuality and reproduction,
socializing, mobility, or political resistance. It was recognizable in metaphors
of walls, barricades, and fortifications – between bodies, categories, and
spaces – and of the floods, swarms, and invasions that imperiled them. In US
foreign relations history, advocates for the containment of both Asian migrants
and globalizing communism, for example, drew on absolutist tropes of
menacing flows and beleaguered ramparts.
By contrast, civilizing power was grounded in process: individuals and
groups were assessed precisely in terms of their position and potential with
respect to advancement in hierarchical, evolutionary time. Standards of
civilization were necessarily ones along which subjects could move: bodily
comportment, labor discipline, political rationality, material/technological
sophistication, education and literacy, capital accumulation, consumption,
urbanity. Identity with or proximity to Europe – understood biologically,
252 Paul A. Kramer

religio-culturally, or historically – was a core if contested feature. If civilizing

power had two defining metrics, they were moralized, patriarchal, heterosexual
order – especially, the containing of women’s sexuality within male-dominated
households – and the capacity of individuals and groups to inculcate civilizing
disciplines in what were understood to be peripheries: downward across the
social scale, and outward toward the state’s geographic fringes. Political life
consisted of the use of disciplining standards to gauge degrees of socio-political
incorporation, rights, and power. Historical expressions of civilizing power
would include Anglo-American Protestant missionary endeavors of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Cold War-era programs in
international student migration to the United States, both of which sought the
global diffusion of civilized and civilizing forms.19 One clearly recognizable
index of civilizing power was the presence of a logic of bipolarity – heathen/
convert, bad Muslim/good Muslim – across which progress was possible,
desired and required.20
For complex political and intellectual-historical reasons, race is often
confused with only its absolutizing variant. Indeed, what I am calling
civilizing power was (and is) commonly posed as the opposite of “race”;
according to conventional (and problematic) definitions of race – as bodily,
totalizing, and immutable – civilizing power is not racial. Precisely for this
reason, it is important to ask what exactly was exceptionalizing, descent-
making, and dominating – racial, in my terms – about civilizing formations?
There was the question of how the uncivilized might progress: theoretically
capable of universal advance and the rights that came with it, they were
simultaneously held back by unique obstacles, particularly by deep,
intractable (but not necessarily immutable) traits based especially in
culture, social structure, family, and behavior. Only the summoning of
extraordinary disciplinary power – surveillance, evaluation, policing, and
violence – might advance the uncivilized and gauge their always contingent
prospects for socio-political membership. In civilizing formations, absolutist
imagery of the other served as the metric of progress, the “base” from
which the would-be civilized must seek to climb. Finally, there were the
ways that civilizing power’s universalizing pretentions required symbolisms
of diversity that, in turn, required the fixing of individual and group
particularities, emptied of meanings that undermined universalist claims.
The formerly uncivilized could only convey civilization’s universality if they
also, always, represented their uncivilized pasts. By the late twentieth
century, imperial diversity – civilized multitudes posing no threat to
capital’s remorseless, universalizing advance – became one of the defining
faces of a globalized market fundamentalism underwritten by US state
power.
One of the reasons for civilizing power’s misrecognition as anti-racial was its
use as a weapon by historical actors in their campaigns against absolutizing
power: for them, the capacity of individuals within subordinated groups (at
Racialized power 253

least, some of them), to conform to civilization’s strict, legitimate dictates

successfully undermined illegitimate, “racial” assertions of wholesale,
permanent inferiority. But if, as done here, race is defined in terms of
exception, descent, and domination, civilizing power was a key expression of
racializing power, arguably one of its most resilient, elusive, and invisible forms.
By the early twenty-first century, scholars had begun to capture it with terms
such as racial liberalism, color-blindness, flexible racism, inclusionary racism,
cultural racism, and liberal accommodation, each concept shedding some light
and some darkness.21 Civilization and its cognates, closely associated with the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can seem an awkward rhetorical fit for
later periods. But their utility resides in precisely this strangeness: it may point
historians’ attention to hidden continuities that undermine comforting accounts
of rupture – of race’s rise and fall – requiring them to ask to what extent the
ancestors of modernization theory, neoliberal globalization, and
multiculturalism wore Victorian pith helmets.22
In large part because of the mistaken identification of race with only its
absolutizing variants, US foreign relations historians (among many others)
have constructed an overarching narrative that tracks race’s high tide in the
late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and its mid-century
downfall under the combined pressures of anti-fascism, anti-communism,
decolonization, and black freedom politics. When writing about periods after
about 1975, with so many of race’s conventional markers behind them – Jim
Crow, race war in Vietnam, the racialized exclusion of immigrants – these
historians have found race far harder to identify, with the key exception of
the politics of South African apartheid; to the extent that US foreign relations
historians factored in race at all, it was relatively easy for them to consign it to
the past, whatever recurrent, painful evidence to the contrary.
With race reconceptualized along the lines I’ve suggested – as the
compounding of exception, descent, and domination, with more absolutizing
and more civilizing variants – the story of the twentieth century shifts
profoundly, from the “fall” of race, to the relative decline of absolutizing
formations and the relative triumph of civilizing ones, beginning at the turn of
the twentieth century, rather than its midpoint. The relative nature of this shift is
critically important. Absolutizing power obviously survived its mid-twentieth-
century crises, and the transition toward the hegemony of civilizing modes was
partial, fragmented, and embattled, far more evident in some socio-political
contexts than others. At the same time, absolutizing and civilizing efforts could
and did commingle in a single setting, institution, or project, easily and uneasily.
But a transition toward civilizing modes of power and differentiation was
nonetheless unmistakable. It was measurable, for example, in political-
cultural shifts in American public life from the legitimate political invocation
of the Black Beast, the Lazy Native, and the Yellow Peril, absolutizing power’s
defining others, to the conjuring of the criminal, the terrorist, and the illegal,
civilizing power’s constitutive enemies. The plausible deniability of these modes
254 Paul A. Kramer

of differentiation as “race” when it came to the mid-twentieth-century

absolutizing standard – in theory and practice, criminals, terrorists, and illegals
can be white – only enhanced their power to conceive, institutionalize, and
legitimate relations of exception, descent, and domination.
Despite dogged denials of race’s relevance to US foreign relations history and
historiography, what strikes even the casual reader is, to the contrary, the rich
constellation of literatures in which racialized power features as a theme in the
history of United States’ relations with the wider world. First, and
overarchingly, is a literature that deals with the constitution of sovereignty in
the emergent international politico-legal order of the nineteenth century. As
Euro-American imperial powers extended their geographic reach, they
constituted themselves as sovereigns through a globalizing politics of
recognition that set the boundary between statehood and its others at
“civilization,” subordinating or liquidating polities that failed to meet its
Eurocentric “standards,” particularly when it came to legal order and the
protection of Euro-American migrants and their property.23 By the early
twentieth century, the global map of subordinating sovereignties – binding
large parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to Euro-American powers –
played a profound role in generating both affirmative and critical senses of
“race” itself.
One of the defining features of this civilizationist order was what might be
called its particularist universalism: while anchored geographically in Europe and
Christianity, it was also necessarily capable of indefinite expansion, at least
theoretically. The admission of Japan and the Ottoman Empire into the
“society” of recognized states reinforced these claims to universality vis-à-vis
exceptions of “race” and religion. Indeed, some scholars have embraced the logic
of civilizing internationalism as their own, celebrating non-Western elites’ pursuit
of international recognition and narrating their gradual triumph over “race,”
culminating in the rise of the generalized norm of national states in the post-1945
period. In doing so, they have underplayed the ways that civilizationist order
encoded exception, descent, and domination in post-absolutist ways.24 Civilizing
internationalism was a system of membership that was also a system of discipline,
discipline felt most heavily at aspirant states’ social margins (nomads, the poor,
women, minoritized groups), as would-be states civilized themselves “internally”
in search of international recognition.
The best work in this field explores sovereignty as an idiom of difference, in
which the crucial boundary-line was ultimately between those who could be
subjected to Euro-American powers, and those that could not; it also critically
historicizes civilizing modes rather than analytically and normatively
embracing them.25 In the world of imperial internationalism, racialized
difference was often measured in the capacity for self-rule, with certain
“races” understood to possess these capacities, while others were lacking
them, and thus in need of Euro-American supervision, discipline, and,
sometimes, assimilative training. The US national government’s repeated
Racialized power 255

violation of treaties with Native Americans, for example, forcefully enacted the
non-recognition and strategic recognition of native polities, drawing upon and
reinforcing the sense that native peoples remained in a prior, inferior stage of
political evolution. When it came to the question of whether differences were
absolute or capable of civilizing mitigation, imperial states varied not only
between themselves, but internally, their choices dependent on setting, timing,
and the peculiarities of local–foreign political relationships. Where “natives”
were granted limited degrees of sovereignty, the perceived character of their rule
was tapped as a rich font of colonial ideology – apparent irrationality,
corruption, superstition, and conflict were carefully extracted from the
colonial condition and made to register the intractable barbarism of the
colonized and the inherence of “good government” in the racialized
geography of the West.26 While the racializing of sovereignty and the
sovereigntizing of race could stabilize colonial rule, they also generated
racially aversive anti-colonialisms, particularly where states lacked the
required tools for insulating their politics fully from the agency of those
subjected to their sovereignty. In the United States and elsewhere, the fear that
migrating or enfranchised colonial subjects might compromise metropolitan
self-government haunted the dreams of many an anti-colonialist.27
Closest to traditional diplomatic-historical methods have been state-centered
works that focus on the ways that US state actors – diplomats, executives,
legislators, and policymakers – and adjunct civil society elites approached
questions of racialized domination based inside the United States (such as Jim
Crow) or outside it (such as South African apartheid); this literature has paid
particular attention to the conjunctures of Cold War and decolonization politics
in delegitimating absolutizing racial power. Some of this literature has focused on
the ways officials’ ideas about racialized difference shaped their policy
approaches toward European colonialism and anti-colonial struggle,
particularly when it came to assessing the progressive or regressive character of
European domination, and the “maturity” and “stability” of anti-colonial
forces.28 Other scholarship has focused on the ways policymakers came to see
absolutist systems – especially those identified with the US South – as a diplomatic
impediment, even as they failed to view these systems as problematic in their own
right. Once associated with modern statehood itself, the politics of aggressive
Euro-American supremacy increasingly came to be seen as dangerously unaligned
with the desires of those decolonizers whose allegiance US policymakers
anxiously sought. As this scholarship shows, anti-racist and anti-colonialist
activists operating both inside and outside the United States – and often moving
between these spaces – played a catalytic role in channeling Cold War fears
toward anti-segregation, and generating the belated, begrudging official sense
that it was not worth losing the world over Whites Only signs.29 The United
States’ abiding support for the apartheid regime in South Africa nonetheless made
clear the ways that violent, absolutist domination was fully compatible with Cold
War notions of anti-communist “freedom.”30
256 Paul A. Kramer

Race has also figured prominently in scholarship located at the intersection

of cultural history and US foreign relations history, which foregrounds
questions of rhetoric, symbolism, and imagery – “discourse” – to explore the
ideological architecture of Americans’ perceptions of the world; much of this
literature has centered on the foundational role of racialized and gendered
difference in the symbolic constitution of the US national “self” and its many
and varied “others.” Some scholarship, carried out by foreign relations
historians moving toward “culture” and arguing against Cold War claims
that Americans were somehow immune to “ideology,” identified race as one
of a number of belief systems Americans employed to make sense of the world;
while this work participated in the broader mentalizing of race, it nonetheless
played a decisive role in legitimating race as an object of inquiry for US
diplomatic historians.31 Other work, carried out by American Studies
scholars moving toward “the world,” and often employing versions of a
Saidian analysis of Orientalism, applied cultural studies techniques of
deconstructive reading primarily to the work of US cultural producers.32 This
scholarship emphasized continuities in Americans’ racialized and gendered
perceptions: the ways that recognizable, prior formations were “exported” to
make sense of newly encountered situations and populations. While provincial
in its questions and methods – particularly to the extent that it labeled itself
“transnational” – this literature powerfully demonstrated the ways that
Americans have shaped and imagined imperial power relations in racialized
and gendered ways.33 Other scholarship, characterized by transnationalized
questions and methods and sources, asked how Americans’ visions of the
other were forged in specific, historically changing contexts of encounter, and
shaped by the agency, cultures, and histories of those they sought to apprehend.
Aligned with other histories seeking to challenge national frames of analysis,
this work demonstrated that Americans’ racialized practices were not strictly
derivable from any one national history, but emerged dynamically,
contingently, and unpredictably from confluences and collisions between
multiple histories.34
Emerging at the crossroads of ethnic studies, African American studies,
social movement history, and US foreign relations history is research that
explores the formation of cross-national solidarities informed by racialized
distinction, across sometimes vast geographic space. Some of these works
examine varieties of emancipatory politics – especially the connective
recognition of common problems and common struggles among those
subjected to racialized exception. Especially central to this literature has been
the development of a self-consciously transnational politics among African
Americans, from the redemptionist, civilizing visions of Africa in the
nineteenth century, to the more assertively anti-colonialist politics of
the interwar years, allied with Indian, Ethiopian, and Haitian struggles, to the
more globalized anti-colonialisms of the post-1945 period, anti-colonialisms
that took on rival pro-communist and anti-communist forms. This work has
Racialized power 257

centered on dynamics of intercultural solidarity: the question of how those

subjected to racialized power built convergences between themselves and
often distant others, how they constructed and maintained long-distance ties,
and how they sought to leverage transnational connections into “boomerang”
effects on national instruments of power.35
While much of this literature celebrates transnational, anti-racist solidarities
as such, some works also flag troubling questions of solidarity’s misfires, as in
some African Americans’ support for Japan’s colonial conquests in East Asia,
understood as the triumph of a vanguardist “colored” empire that would
displace and delegitimate white supremacist colonialisms (even as it brought
its force against Asian subjects in Korea and China).36 Other scholarship has
examined shared, transnational senses of racialized privilege and power among
the globally dominant. Solidarity was not just for subalterns: even as national-
imperial states jockeyed with each other for colonies, resources, and markets,
their politicians, officials, and intellectuals built compelling inter-imperial
narratives of shared mission, danger, and sacrifice. These narratives –
grounded in the different idioms of whiteness, Anglo-Saxonism, and the West
– crystallized upon, and underwrote, projects in inter-imperial cooperation and
alliance.37 They were often built around long-distance senses of common
predicament, especially when it came to the maintenance of racially
subordinating labor systems and the restriction of undesired migration, and
they helped empire-builders explain their dominance to themselves and others,
while embedding nationalist ideologies and pursuits in the transcendent forces
of nature.38
Allied with solidarity scholarship are histories of the transfer of techniques of
racialized domination and resistance: of historical actors’ selective borrowing
and adaptation of technologies of racialized labor control, migrant exclusion,
and socio-political subordination from other societies, on the one hand, and the
strategies of organizing, confrontation, and resistance, on the other. The
transnational itineraries of segregation, the literacy test, eugenic knowledge
and policy, and nonviolent resistance are among the best explored of these
trajectories.39 So, too, have historians painted vivid pictures of efforts to
impose segregated spatial and social arrangements by US officials in occupied
towns during and after World War II and in the Panama Canal Zone, and by US
companies in oil enclaves in the Middle East.40 These transfers were both
enabled by and indexical of broader connections, especially the transport and
communication grids that allowed historical actors to move beyond their
ordinary frames of reference, finding and inventing solutions that had
previously eluded them among what they perceive to be successful outsiders,
or extending adapted variants of pre-existing formulas they had the power to
execute. This still-small literature seldom links up to scholarship on “transfer”
self-consciously, but it nonetheless shares many of its core features, especially
accounts of mobile experts, technocrats, and intellectuals: professional
comparers and learners who often joined a sense of domestic blockage to
258 Paul A. Kramer

optimistic faith (sometimes naïve or utopian faith) in foreign solutions. Borne

by steamship, railroad, and airplane, webbed together by conferences, lecture
circuits, and journals, these experts grappled with the myriad challenges of
remaking parts of their societies with pieces they drew from others.41 In
mapping out this world of transfers, historians face the occupational hazard
of homology – of turning perceived similarities of cultures, practices, or
institutions in discrete settings into evidence of connection – but this danger
does not diminish the prospects for illuminating accounts of the ways racialized
systems informed and influenced each other.
Scholarship on the centrality of race to the politics of migration,
naturalization, and US boundary control is only recently beginning to
intersect with US foreign relations history in earnest. Early work on US–Japan
relations necessarily treated the international politics of migration, including its
racialized dimensions, but otherwise, US immigration policy history and foreign
relations history remained largely separate, a gap that is being rapidly and richly
filled as historians reconstruct the complex ways in which US boundaries were
shaped by transnational and global processes.42 This said, race has unavoidably
figured prominently in US immigration historiography, given its centrality to US
migration and naturalization policy itself. From the 1790 naturalization act,
with its exclusionary invitation to “free white persons of good character,” to
anti-Chinese legislation, to civilizing distinctions among Japanese, Chinese,
Indian, and South and Eastern Europeans, to the confidently absolutizing
national origins quota system, with its preferences for Northern and Western
Europeans, to the post-9/11 targeting of Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians,
racialized distinction has played a foundational role in policy and popular
determinations of who constituted “desirable” denizens and citizens of the
United States and who represented threats.43
The racialized dimensions of US immigration policy were also among their
most fiercely contested features, as migrants, their communities and states of
origin all protested stigmatizing exceptions in law, policy, and enforcement, as
well as the essentializing visions they embodied and promoted. Intersecting with
the Cold War politicizing of Jim Crow as a global embarrassment was the view
that the rigidly absolutist national origins quota system was both a logistical
headache (the anti-communist escapees that US policymakers hoped to relocate
inconveniently clustered in the tightly restricted regions of Eastern Europe and
East Asia) and sent out insulting and inaccurate messages about the United
States’ friends and enemies.44 This argument that US immigration policy needed
not only to protect “domestic” space from corrupting influences, but to help
project US power transnationally and globally rose in influence during the Cold
War and its aftermath: the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, for example, best known for
dismantling the last vestiges of national origins, was, less familiarly, a tool for
attracting the technical experts required for military-industrial competition,
facilitating the escape of refugees from communist states, and sending signals
about the exceptional capacity of capitalist societies to diversify. While
Racialized power 259

immigration scholarship has tended to thematize and problematize restriction,

one of the distinct contributions of an immigration–foreign relations nexus may
be to bring critical attention to the geopolitics of opening.45
Similarly emerging on the scene are works that interweave questions of race,
capitalism, and US foreign relations. Race was relatively marginal to the earliest
diplomatic historians who problematized capitalism in US foreign relations, the
Wisconsin School; similarly, dynamics of commodification, labor exploitation,
capital accumulation, and class power were not emphasized in many of the early
histories of US foreign relations that took race seriously. The reasons for this
disjuncture are complex. Especially important are both direct and internalized
Cold War pressures not to place capitalism in a critical spotlight, and an
intractable, polarized rivalry between totalized “race” and “class” critiques.
Critical breakthroughs occurred earliest not among foreign relations historians,
but among critical intellectuals during the Vietnam War era, especially intellectuals
of color, who began to combine critiques of racial domination, colonialism, and
capitalism; Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 4, 1967, “Beyond Vietnam” address is
one of the many eloquent expressions of this position.46 Equally important were
histories that connected racial slavery and industrial capitalism; once seen as the
pre-modern, feudal precursor to capitalist modernity, slavery was recast as
capitalism’s foundationally modern laboratory and engine.47
With the fading of Cold War polarities, the rise of a critical politics of
globalization, and crises of capitalism in the early twenty-first century, new
and vital spaces opened up for a scholarship capable of making critical,
combined sense of race and capital in the United States’ transnational
histories. Entering and widening this space is scholarship that explores
racialized dimensions of imperial labor regimes: elites’ deliberate use of
divide-and-rule tactics to split potentially rebellious workers along lines of
color, language, and nationality; the ranking of workers along essentializing
grids with respect to their propensities for labor, compliance, and rebellion; the
vulnerability of race-dominant workers when it came to racializing,
nationalizing appeals, and their complicity in promoting, democratizing, and
inflicting them on others.48 As this work shows, there were horrific
convergences between racialized exception and the capitalist hyper-
exploitation of labor, affinities that were only amplified in exceptionalized,
anything-goes spaces of empire. There is also scholarship on racialized
dimensions of the economic projects of US government agencies and US-based
banks in their transnational operations: the exceptionalizing regimes of
economic discipline imposed on some societies but not others; the relentless,
essentializing calculus of which peoples were capable of capitalist rationality –
self-interest, accumulation, profit maximization, and the exploitation of others,
for example – a virtue understood by many to be characteristically white and
Western.49 This literature’s main challenge will be to resist the longstanding
temptation to reduce race to capitalism’s mandates, or capitalism to the logics
of race-making; it will succeed only to the extent that it cultivates and sustains a
260 Paul A. Kramer

dynamic, dialectical interplay between the politics of exploitation and

marginality, capital and exception.
Finally, race figures in complex and varied ways in the historiographies of
militarization, war-making, and occupation in the United States. From colonial
militias to the late twentieth-century all-volunteer military, racialized
distinction has powerfully shaped the building and organization of US
military forces, for example. The impulse to exclude non-white men from
military service, or to subordinate them within it, derived in part from the
perceived dangers of arming and training people subjected to racialized
domination. It also owed much to the martial dimensions of American
republicanism: to the extent that military sacrifice provided access to US civic
belonging, political rights, and veterans’ benefits (at least in theory), racially
subordinated soldiers and veterans, and their wives, widows, and families,
might leverage martial patriotism against race in ways that could undermine
supremacist power relations. Pressures to employ and integrate non-white
soldiers into US military forces included voracious demands for military
labor, political activism by racially subjected groups, and the logistical tangles
involved in maintaining segregated forces and facilities.
Until the formal integration of the US military during the early Cold War, the
dominant approach to the problem of extracting military labor without
conceding troubling rights was subordinated inclusion: segregated units and
facilities, the disproportionate assignment of non-white soldiers to stigmatized
“labor” duty, highly restrictive policies toward non-white officers (especially
when it came to the command of white soldiers), lower military pay, and
harassment by soldiers and civilians, all underwritten by imagery that racialized
capacities for martial virtue and discipline by casting non-white soldiers as
cowardly, lazy, barbaric, insubordinate, and disloyal. As white supremacists
feared, racially subordinated soldiers, their families and communities did
advance claims for inclusion on the grounds of martial participation: claims
that proved especially compelling where the United States’ enemies promoted
racial ideologies possessing uncomfortable similarities to the United States’
own.50 Furthermore, racially oppressed soldiers’ novel, inter-cultural
encounters during overseas military deployments could prove politically
transformative, especially where these soldiers encountered relative acceptance,
recognition, and even celebration, or developed new, critical solidarities.51 To
paraphrase the World War I-era jazz hit, after they’d seen “Paree” – or anywhere
else they were less exposed to racist brutality – black soldiers proved harder to
keep down on the farm, metaphorically and literally.
At the same time, assertions of rights on the grounds of martial patriotism
and sacrifice, and their far less frequent realization, gave non-white people a
stake in the US national-imperial state, and the politics of racial inclusion would
become increasingly militarized during and after the Cold War: as non-white
soldiers came to enjoy the fruits of US global power and segregated military and
civilian structures gave way, imperial expansion and racial integration became
Racialized power 261

powerfully intertwined.52 While it indexed the racialized character of the US

class structure, for example, the “diversity” of the all-volunteer military and the
prominence of non-white people in leadership roles was mobilized as a sign of
its meritocracy and color-blindness: increasingly detached from the rest of
American society, the US military came to represent the inclusionary
vanguard of the stratified society for which it fought.
From long before the United States’ founding, war proved a crucible in which
racialized division was forged, expressed, and contested. In contexts of war-
making, existing distinctions of friend and enemy were seized upon and
deepened, but also uprooted and transformed, as participants reframed their
notions of self, community, state, and opponent amid the exigencies of combat
and the broader geopolitics in which it was embedded. Given the importance of
racialized supremacy to Anglo-American settler-colonial polities and the US
national state at its founding, it is unsurprising that racial hierarchy often
played a role in defining the ends of US warfare: from the conquest and
removal of indigenous people in the interests of a continental “empire of
liberty,” to the transnational diffusion of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the
world’s darker corners, to the modernizing terrors of American
counterinsurgency in the decolonizing world, particularly in Southeast Asia,
to the civilizing globalism of the “war on terror.” In varying ways, American
proponents of these wars, and many of the American soldiers who fought in
them, justified these campaigns by exceptionalizing and essentializing
themselves as protagonists and their opponents as inferiors, rooting these
claims in transcendent notions of nature, history, and the sacred.
Race also played a recurrent role in the way Americans approached the
means of war: the question of which tactics, strategies, and targets were
legitimate and illegitimate. Here the bounding and unbounding of violence
was often tied to perceptions of the enemy: their rationale for fighting, their
willingness to surrender, and the ease or difficulty of distinguishing combatants
from civilians, for example. Racial superiority was keyed to a hierarchy of
fighting styles: civilized people – Europe and its offshoots – ostensibly fought
legalized, rights-protecting, civilized campaigns, while barbarians fought
irregular ones rooted in brutality, concealment, and deception and terrorism.
Across the decolonizing world, the racializing of combat and militarizing of
racial distinction allowed rebels’ guerrilla struggles in contexts of asymmetric
warfare to be enlisted as arguments for both the civilizing mission and the
abandonment of civilized warfare by dominant powers. It was not, then,
simply that Americans waged particular kinds of wars against states and
peoples they racialized in particular ways; war-making and race-making were
dynamically interwoven processes, with sinister elective affinities between the
exceptionalizing of the enemy and their subjection to exceptional forms of
violence. Where these dynamics spiraled together most intensely, the result
could be racial exterminism, the legitimation of violence against all members
of a “race” during war’s duration as a matter of tactics and strategy, and
262 Paul A. Kramer

genocide, in which the physical elimination of an “enemy race” was war’s

ultimate goal.53 This race/war dynamic unfolded not only in battle zones, but
in more expansive war zones that included “home fronts”: when, for example,
people of Japanese descent, including many US citizens, were presumed
inherently loyal to Japan during World War II, their already-fragile hold on
American civic membership was devastated by what might be called the hard
hand of war essentialism.54 Racially subordinated soldiers and civilians would
have complex encounters with racialized US wars, in some cases seeing
participation in the campaigns as an opportunity to blunt oppressions
directed against them by proving their loyalty and manhood, in other cases
losing faith with the US war effort on racial and other grounds, and even forging
sympathies and solidarities with the racialized adversary.55
Finally, race and war crossed when it came to the politics of legitimation,
particularly where the United States confronted states whose national identities
were grounded in racist narratives (as in the case of Nazi Germany), or “anti-
racist” ones (as in the case of Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union). In such
cases, Americans often found their exceptionalist pretensions to democracy and
freedom challenged on uncomfortably global terrain, particularly where the
propaganda engines of enemy states capitalized upon and amplified US racial
domination, exclusion, and violence. As early as the turn of the twentieth
century, some Americans had anxiously observed a crisis of white supremacy,
evidenced in restive colonial populations and, especially, by the military-
imperial rise of Japan.56 Over the course of the century, anti-racial activists
would take advantage of, and deepen, these vulnerabilities. During World War
II, for example, they would – within the stringent constraints of wartime loyalty
politics – construct critical equivalences between Jim Crow and European
fascism through a “Double Victory” campaign against racial terrorisms far
and near. Despite the common historical claim that the war against the Nazis
and Americans’ encounters with the Holocaust delegitimated racism in the
United States, fighting extremely racist enemies also managed, to the contrary,
to persuade many white Americans that their own racial problematics were
comparatively negligible and benign.
Where the United States faced off against powers like Japan and the Soviet
Union, which ferociously criticized Euro-American racism and colonialism
(while rationalizing away their own), anti-racial activists, as well as many
powerful policymakers, argued that the United States must reform itself (at
least when it came to Jim Crow and the national origins quota system) to render
itself less vulnerable to these charges, particularly before the skeptical eyes of
the decolonizing world.57 Self-reform would also, importantly, free Americans
to stigmatize rival states’ “domestic” oppressions, as in the case of Soviet anti-
Semitism. Such calls to dismantle absolutist systems in wartime were muted by
actual and potential charges of disloyalty – particularly where Americans’
criticisms of the United States echoed the enemy’s – and deflected by
increasingly subtle image-making efforts that detached state symbolism from
Racialized power 263

substantive change. While often registered as a factor in the triumph of anti-Jim

Crow politics, the Cold War civil rights intersection needs to be explored more
fully as one moment in the much longer history of the United States’ pursuit of
hegemonic legitimacy in a decolonizing world. The defining down of race to
merely its absolutist modes, discussed above, is not separable from this history
and may, in fact, be one of its most enduring artifacts.
To the extent that US foreign relations historians traditionally followed the
analytic lead of the policymakers they studied, there was a certain irony in their
reluctance to take race seriously as an analytic category: in their ambivalence,
and even hostility, to these inquiries, they were breaking with historical actors,
for whom race was often a critical, shape-shifting factor in considerations of the
United States’ engagements with the wider world. For some, race was
ontological reality, nature’s gift and burden to statecraft, with the
preservation of white supremacy in and among the United States’ other state
interests. For others, it constituted a managerial concern as the United States –
born in settler colonialism and slavery-based capitalism – fought rearguard
struggles to achieve hegemonic legitimacy in a world its racial systems defined
as largely non-white. For still others, especially anti-racial and anti-colonial
campaigners, race was a socio-political problem: one of the core elements of a
hierarchical, Eurocentric world order that must be uprooted in the pursuit of
social justice both within and between societies. Regardless of their position on
its precise meaning, historical actors might have been surprised to hear
assertions that race ought to be, at most, a minor consideration in US foreign
relations history.
The impulse to take race seriously in histories of the US in the world arose in
the wake of mid-twentieth-century social movements that disrupted and
problematized naturalized hierarchies of racial exception at national and
international scales. As this chapter has attempted to show, the result has
been extremely generative in historiographic terms, bringing hitherto
understudied dynamics to light and neglected actors to the fore. Among the
most important benefits of this literature is its capacity to move forward the de-
insulation of US foreign relations historiography itself. Race is one of a number
of analytic categories and methodologies – gender and cultural history also
come to mind – that have long been central to US historiography and history-
writing in general, and can therefore be seen as bridges across the still
formidable divides between “domestic” US and “international” histories. To
the extent that these analytic categories advance, US foreign relations historians
may find it more and more difficult – and, perhaps, less and less desirable – to
isolate and exceptionalize themselves vis-à-vis other historians of the United
States, as well as international and global historians more generally.
In this process, though, historians of racialized power – whether working
within national or transnationalized frames – would do well to recognize the
ways in which the very meanings of “race” largely derive from mid-to-late
twentieth-century intellectual-political framings, forged in the long (and
264 Paul A. Kramer

unfinished) struggle against absolutist racial power in the United States: as

bodily, color-coded, and mental, scientized and segregating, fixed and fixing.
Even as these definitions have enabled both historical analysis and critical
politics, they have rendered the operations of civilizing power less visible, in
part because of the very ways they have been enlisted in anti-absolutist struggle.
Historians of race can and should do more than problematize expressions of
racialized power with which John F. Kennedy himself was frustrated, and this
task, in turn, requires not only empirical reconstruction, but creative
reconceptualization. Shedding critical light on structures of exception,
descent, and domination – in their absolutist expressions, and their more
subtle and sinuous ones – remains a necessary and urgent task.

notes
My thanks to Dirk Bönker, Nathan Connolly, Andrew Friedman, Kevin Kim, Matthew
Lassiter, Adriane Lentz-Smith, Noam Maggor, Daniel Margolies, Andrew Rotter,
Michael Thompson, Andrew Zimmerman, and the Vanderbilt Americanist workshop
for their comments and critiques, and to Frank Costigliola and Michael Hogan for their
support.
1. Renee Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity: African Diplomats, the State
Department, and Civil Rights,” Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 2
(2000), 546–79.
2. Quotations from “Big Step Ahead on a High Road,” Life Magazine, December 8,
1961, 32–9.
3. On Kennedy and African decolonization, see Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the
Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders (New York,
2012); James H. Meriwether, “‘Worth a Lot of Negro Votes’: Black Voters, Africa,
and the 1960 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History, Vol. 95, No. 3
(December 2008), 737–63.
4. For helpful historiographic assessments of race and US foreign relations history,
see Gerald Horne, “Race to Insight: The U.S. and the World, White Supremacy
and Foreign Affairs,” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds.
Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd edition (New
York, 2004), 323–35; Ryan M. Irwin, “Mapping Race: Historicizing the
History of the Color-Line,” History Compass, Vol. 8, No. 9 (September
2010), 984–99.
5. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981).
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Present Outlook for the Darker Races of Mankind,” A. M.
E. Church Review, Vol. 17 (October 1900), 95–110.
7. On the State Department and racial exclusion, see Michael Krenn, Black
Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–1969 (Armonk,
NY, 1999). Also important was the normative imperialism of early international
relations scholarship. See Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics:
The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2015).
Racialized power 265

8. Thomas Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese–American Crises: An

Account of the International Complications Arising from the Race Problem on
the Pacific Coast (Stanford University Press, 1934); Akira Iriye, Pacific
Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911 (Cambridge,
MA, 1972); Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese
Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (New York,
1969).
9. For a useful collection of essays on race and US foreign policy, see Michael Krenn,
ed., The Impact of Race on U. S. Foreign Policy: A Reader (Routledge, 1999). See
also Krenn’s synthesis, The Color of Empire: Race and American Foreign Relations
(Sterling, VA, 2006).
10. See, for example, the writings of Jack O’Dell: Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black
Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (Berkeley, 2010).
11. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(Princeton, NJ, 2000); Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights
Policies in the United States, 1941–1960 (New York, 2000).
12. For a powerful account of changing theorization of race in the United States, see
Thomas Holt, “Explaining Racism in American History,” in Anthony Molho, ed.,
Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ, 1998),
107–19. For an influential theorization of race, see Michael Omi and Howard
Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s (New
York, 1994). For a collection of theoretical works, see Les Back and John Solomos,
eds., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (New York, 2000).
13. For a charged debate on whether or not US-based conceptualizations of race
constitute an imperial export, see Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, “On the
Cunning of Imperial Reason,” Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1999),
41–58; Michael Hanchard, “Acts of Misrecognition: Transnational Black Politics,
Anti-Imperialism and the Ethnocentrisms of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant,”
Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2003), 5–29.
14. The more conventional criteria here would be essence, fixity, or immutability.
Ideologies and institutionalizations of descent were and are enlisted for
essentializing purposes, but I suggest here that making essence the litmus test for
race is one element in the broader confusion of absolutizing formations with
racialized formations more generally, in the mid-to-late 20th-century mode. In
other words, descent is the overarching feature – involved on both ends of the
abolutizing/civilizing spectrum – with essentialist understandings of descent
present more strongly in instances of absolutizing power.
15. For a powerful account of the related category of “racial individualism,” see Leah
Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury
America (Chicago, 2015).
16. Race is, for example, one of the dimensions of Americans’ foreign relations ideology
in Michael Hunt’s foundational work, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New
Haven, 1987).
17. It merits stating that the United States was not exceptional in the role that race
played in its foreign policy. For a collection that explores the role of race in other
states’ Cold War politics, for example, see Philip E. Muehlenbeck, ed., Race,
Ethnicity, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Nashville, 2012).
266 Paul A. Kramer

18. For a compelling discussion of “race-making,” see Thomas C. Holt, “Marking:

Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review, Vol.
100, No. 1 (February 1995), 1–20.
19. Paul A. Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and US Global
Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 3
(November 2009), 775–806.
20. For recent instances, see Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim:
America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York, 2005); Evelyn
Asultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11
(New York, 2012).
21. The terms racial liberalism, color-blindness, and cultural racism are widely used by
scholars. On flexible racism, see Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age
of Empire (New York, 2006). On inclusionary racism, see Kramer, The Blood of
Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill,
2006). On liberal accommodationism, see George Fredrickson, The Black Image in
the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny (New York,
1971). The politics of respectability can also be seen as a variant of civilizing power.
See, for example, Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and
Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996); Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black
Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, 1994).
22. For linkages along these lines, see Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of
Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold
War to the Present (Ithaca, 2011); Jon Davidann: “‘Colossal Illusions’: U.S.–
Japanese Relations in the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1919–1938,” Journal of
World History, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 2001), 155–82.
23. Jorg Fisch, “International Civilization by Dissolving International Society: The
Status of Non-European Territories in 19th Century International Law,” in
Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism:
Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (New York,
2001), 235–58; Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of
International Law (New York, 2007).
24. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford,
UK, 1984); Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World
Order in Pan-Islamism and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, 2007).
25. See, for example, Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body
of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994).
26. See, for example, Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S.
Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, 2002); Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “Subject People”
and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto
Rico (New York); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of
U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Lanny Thompson, Imperial
Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S.
Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu, 2010); Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other
Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC, 2000); Warwick Anderson, Colonial
Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
(Durham, NC, 2006); Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery:
Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines
Racialized power 267

(Berkeley, 2001); Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible:
Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison, 2009); Kramer,
Blood of Government.
27. Christopher Lasch, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality of
Man,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 24 (August 1958): 319–31; Eric Love,
Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 2004).
28. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations
in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Jason C. Parker, Brother’s Keeper:
The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937–1962 (New
York, 2008); Cary Fraser, Ambivalent Anti-colonialism: The United States and the
Genesis of West Indian, 1940–1964 (Westport, CT, 1994); Mark Bradley,
Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950
(Chapel Hill, 2003); George White, Jr., Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and
American Foreign Policy toward Africa, 1953–1961 (Guilford, CT, 2005); Andrew
Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca,
2000).
29. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights
Policies in the United States; Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom:
Race, Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill, 2003).
30. Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and
Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993); Thomas J. Noer, Cold
War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968
(Columbia, MO, 1985); Ryan Irwin, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking
of the Liberal World Order (New York, 2012).
31. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. On US foreign relations historians’
approaches to Edward Said’s Orientalism and broader questions of ideology, see
Andrew Rotter, “Saidism without Said: Orientalism and U. S. Diplomatic History,”
The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4 (Oct. 2000), 1205–17.
32. The key volume that initiated this approach was Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease,
eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, 1993).
33. For a critique of this “export” model of race, see Paul A. Kramer, “Transits of Race:
Empire and Difference in Philippine-American History,” in Manfred Berg and
Simon Wendt, eds., Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on
Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (New York, 2011), 163–91.
34. See, for example, Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington,
the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2012);
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s
Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008);
Kramer, The Blood of Government.
35. The literature on transnational black politics in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries is rich and growing. Key works include Richard J. M. Blackett, Building
an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement,
1830–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2002); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, 1996); Brenda
Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of
Decolonization, 1954–1974 (New York, 2013); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the
Prize: African-Americans, the United Nations, and the Struggle for Human
Rights, 1944–1955 (New York, 2003); Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The
NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York, 2014);
268 Paul A. Kramer

Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
1937–1957 (Ithaca, 1997); Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black
Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, 2006); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black
is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA,
2004); James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and
Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, 2002); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The
Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA,
2012); Nico Slate, ed., Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of
the Black Power Movement (New York, 2012); Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora:
Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel
Hill, 2010); Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a
Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, 2014); Jonathan
Seth Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American
Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, 2005);
Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical
Imagination (Durham, 2014); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom:
Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel
Hill, 2014); Lawrence S. Little, Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist
Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 1884–1916 (Knoxville, 2000);
William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-
Ethiopian War,1935–1941 (Bloomington, 1993); Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a
Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston, 1992); Robert
Vinson, The Americans are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in
Segregationist South Africa (Athens, OH, 2012); Jason C. Parker, “‘Made-in-
America Revolutions?’: The ‘Black University’ and the American Role in the
Decolonization of the Black Atlantic,” Journal of American History, Vol. 93,
No. 3 (2009), 727–50.
36. Mark Gallicchio, The African American Encounters with Japan and China: Black
Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2000). On “radical
Orientalism” among antiwar activists, see Judy Tzu-Chun Wu in Radicals on the
Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era
(Ithaca, 2013).
37. Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between
the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History,
Vol. 88, No. 4 (2002): 1315–53; Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism:
Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, 2015)
38. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s
Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, UK,
2008); Kornel S. Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the Western U.S.–
Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley, 2012); Travis J. Hardy, “Race as an Aspect of the
U.S.–Australian Alliance in World War II,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 38, No. 3
(June 2014), 549–68; David Atkinson, “The Burdens of Whiteness: Asian
Immigration Restriction and White Supremacy in the British Empire and the
United States, 1897–1924,” (PhD dissertation, Boston University, 2010).
39. On the literacy test, see Marilyn Lake, “From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal:
The Invention of the Literacy Test as a Technology of Racial Exclusion,” in Ann
Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds., Connected Worlds: History in Transnational
Perspective (ANU Press, 2005), 215–22.; on eugenics, see Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi
Racialized power 269

Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New

York, 2002); on segregation, see Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of
Divided Cities (Chicago, 2012); on racialized labor control, see Andrew
Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire,
and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2012).
40. On the racialized and gendered politics of US military basing, see Maria Höhn and
Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from
World War Two to the Present (Durham, 2010). On race and the US overseas
military presence during and after World War II, see Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban
and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill, 2007);
Graham Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World
War II Britain (New York, 1988); Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-
American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002); John Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 2000); Yukiko
Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York,
1999); Beth L. Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in
World War II Hawaii (Baltimore, 1994). On the Canal Zone, see Michael E.
Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the
Canal Zone (Durham, 2014). On oil enclaves, see Robert Vitalis, America’s
Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Palo Alto, 2006).
41. For an exemplary work of transfer history, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic
Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998).
42. Donna Gabaccia calls on historians to link immigration and US foreign relations
histories in Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective
(Princeton, 2012). Gordon Chang argues for the necessity of linking Asian-
American histories and US foreign relations histories in “Asian Immigrants and
American Foreign Relations,” in Warren Cohen, Pacific Passages: The Study of
American–East Asian Relations on the Eve of the 21st Century (New York, 1996).
43. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton, 2004); Moon-ho Jung, “Seditious Subjects: Race, State
Violence, and the U.S. Empire,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14 (June
2011), 221–47.
44. Carl Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the
Cold War (Princeton, 2008); Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the
Yellow Peril became the Model Minority (Princeton, 2015).
45. Paul A. Kramer, “Imperial Openings: Civilization, Exemption, and the Geopolitics
of Mobility in the History of Chinese Exclusion, 1868–1910,” Journal of the Gilded
Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 14 (2015), pp. 317–47.
46. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” reprinted in
Martin Luther King., Jr., and Lewis V. Baldwin, eds., “In a Single Garment of
Destiny”: A Global Vision of Justice (Boston Press, 2014).
47. For the roots of this linkage see, especially, W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction:
An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to
Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935); C. L. R. James,
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New
York, 1963 [1938]); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944). For
recent works taking up the analysis of slavery-based capitalism, see Walter Johnson,
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge,
270 Paul A. Kramer

MA, 2013); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the
Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of
Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014).
48. David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the
Management of Labor in U.S. History (New York, 2012); Julie Greene, The Canal
Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York, 2009); Jason
Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central
America (Ithaca, 2011); Jana Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History
between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley, 2008); Daniel E. Bender and Jana
K. Lipman, eds., Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism
(New York, 2015).
49. Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of
Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
50. On African Americans in the US military from World War I into the Cold War, see,
for example, Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and
World War I (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Kimberley L. Philips, War! What is it
Good for?: Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to
Iraq (Chapel Hill, 2012).
51. See, for example, Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil
Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York, 2010).
52. Mike Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military
Empire after World War II (Ithaca, 2010).
53. For the classic account of “race war” in the Pacific during World War II, see John
Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986).
On the racialization of enmity during the Philippine–American War, see Kramer,
The Blood of Government, ch. 2.
54. Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North
America (New York, 2009); Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy:
The Japanese American Internment (Princeton, 2008); Roger Daniels, Prisoners
without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York, 2004). On
postwar shifts in American perception, see Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha
Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA, 2006).
55. See, for example, black soldiers in the Spanish–Cuban–American War and
Philippine–American War: Willard Gatewood, Black Americans and the White
Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Champaign, 1975).
56. Gerald Horne, “Race from Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of
‘White Supremacy,’” Diplomatic History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer 1999), 437–61;
Frank Furedi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race
(London, 1998).
57. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. On the early Soviet indictment of American
racism, see Meredith L. Roman, Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the
Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928–1937 (Lincoln, 2012).