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The United States in the World
White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations
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.
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.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published November 17, 2015
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January 27, 2021
It's clear that Vitalis is an astonishing researcher. His tenacity in finding and mining archives is rewarded with some wonderful nuggets that inform this book's two main themes: (1) international relations as a practice is and has always been infused with racism, and, (2), IR academia has also been infused with racism, denying Black professors tenure, or voice in prominent journals, or publication through respected presses, or leadership roles in professional organizations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these two things intersect in the racism underpinning the very study of international relations. IR academics, often underwritten with funding by industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, have done the ugly work of providing much of the intellectual justification for the self-serving racist actions of states, policymakers, corporations, and global leaders.
Neither of these revelations is earth-shattering. Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, for example, does a much more thorough job showing the complicity of academia in developing and promulgating the racist justifications of exploitive geopolitical behaviors. Where Vitalis fulfills a niche, however, is in focusing in on IR scholars in particular and the IR academic world as it evolved from the first years of the 20th century through the post-WWII period. Organizations and entities that function to this day - the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the International Studies Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and many other research and professional organizations, not to mention prominent universities like Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and many others - were deeply involved in the process of buttressing colonialism and other racist policies, often in explicit efforts to prevent "race-mixing" or diminution of white power at home and abroad.
In fact, as shocking as that last sentence is, Vitalis offers, time and again, evidence that concerns like preserving "Aryan blood" underpinned research projects, infused research results, and were then used to legitimize real world behaviors. I kept wanting to believe that the ugliest views expressed here were fringe, or that I was misreading them or reading too much into them, but Vitalis musters plenty of evidence to show that it was the most respected voices in IR academia who were espousing them and that they were being amplified in prominent presses, conferences, and journals.
Vitalis also wants to challenge the paradigms underpinning IR academic literature, especially realism. He rejects the revisionist history that suggests a long line of realist thought from Thucydides to Waltz and instead he shows how modern conceptions of realism emerged during WWII as the US eyed the possibilities of hegemony and academics sought to describe the world in terms of great power competition, a cleansing concept that black-boxed intentions and agendas and presented states' actions as driven by the irresistible forces of power politics. What better way to marginalize those parts of the world you most want to exploit than to erase them entirely from theory? In the past, marginalization had required first biology-based and then, when that was disproven, culture-based explanations of socio-political superiority that expressed itself through White Man's Burden-style good works and the "uplift" of people of "lesser" or "inferior" races first through colonization and then through international mandates and "trusteeships." All of these behaviors were characterized by the argument, in one form or another, that: "us taking your stuff - resources, labor, land, whatever - is part of us doing you the favor of modeling for you how to be more like us, even though our very actions make your chances of attaining the economic and political systems we recommend all the less likely and despite the fact that we will never see you as equal." The "great power politics" black box of realism - and of neoliberalism - is just much simpler. In the former, uplift is irrelevant, since only great powers matter and they can do what they want wholly unchecked by lesser powers; in the latter, great powers can do what they've always done, with the same justifications and the same explanations for the neo-colonized countries' failures to thrive "despite" SAPs and the Washington Consensus.
As others have done, Vitalis shows the strong disagreements even among Black academics about how best to influence the discipline, politics, and Black opportunity at home and abroad. He shows how there were heated debates about whether and how much Marxism to bring into the discussion of Black exploitation, about whether former colonies should be placed under patronizing mandates or finally allowed actual independence, and about the extent to which exploitation and oppression of diaspora communities and colonized communities was the same. Kendi describes some of these debates as taking place between anti-racists and assimilationist racists. Here, Vitalis puts it in the IR academic context and it's very interesting to see how it plays out.
So, Vitalis gives us all of this and ties it to letters and diaries and long-lost articles and manuscripts; he has dug ingeniously and excavated some gems. That said, the book is SO hard to read. It's unclear down to the very sentences. The switchbacks cause intellectual whiplash. The lack of continuity is befuddling. The players' agendas and goals are hard to follow, especially when, as in the case of Ralph Bunche, for example, they seem to change over time, and depending on which work is being read in what light. Lost Black IR academics are named in one sentence with no follow-up in the next. He also sometimes positions himself as the racists he decries, which is strange when reading. Early on, for example, he writes: "Americans scored high on the 'tests of superiority' except in the South because of the presence there 'of several millions of an inferior race.' What would sustain the Americans was 'pride of blood' and 'an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races,' which secured white men of North America freedom 'from the ball and chain of hybridism'..." etc.
Overall, I not only recommend this book, I assigned it to my students, warts and all, because we all too often take IR as we get it, without looking critically at its evolution, its roots, the roots of the assumptions underpinning it, the nature and privileges and beliefs of the individuals who founded it, not to mention the people who were left out of it, with all the implications of that absence. In the end, reading about the racism that for so long infused IR as a practice and a discipline (and arguably continues to do so) allows students to recognize IR itself as a construct, to think about how and why it was built the way it was, to consider its relationship to global politics, and to recognize their own responsibilities in the discipline.
Neither of these revelations is earth-shattering. Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, for example, does a much more thorough job showing the complicity of academia in developing and promulgating the racist justifications of exploitive geopolitical behaviors. Where Vitalis fulfills a niche, however, is in focusing in on IR scholars in particular and the IR academic world as it evolved from the first years of the 20th century through the post-WWII period. Organizations and entities that function to this day - the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the International Studies Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and many other research and professional organizations, not to mention prominent universities like Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and many others - were deeply involved in the process of buttressing colonialism and other racist policies, often in explicit efforts to prevent "race-mixing" or diminution of white power at home and abroad.
In fact, as shocking as that last sentence is, Vitalis offers, time and again, evidence that concerns like preserving "Aryan blood" underpinned research projects, infused research results, and were then used to legitimize real world behaviors. I kept wanting to believe that the ugliest views expressed here were fringe, or that I was misreading them or reading too much into them, but Vitalis musters plenty of evidence to show that it was the most respected voices in IR academia who were espousing them and that they were being amplified in prominent presses, conferences, and journals.
Vitalis also wants to challenge the paradigms underpinning IR academic literature, especially realism. He rejects the revisionist history that suggests a long line of realist thought from Thucydides to Waltz and instead he shows how modern conceptions of realism emerged during WWII as the US eyed the possibilities of hegemony and academics sought to describe the world in terms of great power competition, a cleansing concept that black-boxed intentions and agendas and presented states' actions as driven by the irresistible forces of power politics. What better way to marginalize those parts of the world you most want to exploit than to erase them entirely from theory? In the past, marginalization had required first biology-based and then, when that was disproven, culture-based explanations of socio-political superiority that expressed itself through White Man's Burden-style good works and the "uplift" of people of "lesser" or "inferior" races first through colonization and then through international mandates and "trusteeships." All of these behaviors were characterized by the argument, in one form or another, that: "us taking your stuff - resources, labor, land, whatever - is part of us doing you the favor of modeling for you how to be more like us, even though our very actions make your chances of attaining the economic and political systems we recommend all the less likely and despite the fact that we will never see you as equal." The "great power politics" black box of realism - and of neoliberalism - is just much simpler. In the former, uplift is irrelevant, since only great powers matter and they can do what they want wholly unchecked by lesser powers; in the latter, great powers can do what they've always done, with the same justifications and the same explanations for the neo-colonized countries' failures to thrive "despite" SAPs and the Washington Consensus.
As others have done, Vitalis shows the strong disagreements even among Black academics about how best to influence the discipline, politics, and Black opportunity at home and abroad. He shows how there were heated debates about whether and how much Marxism to bring into the discussion of Black exploitation, about whether former colonies should be placed under patronizing mandates or finally allowed actual independence, and about the extent to which exploitation and oppression of diaspora communities and colonized communities was the same. Kendi describes some of these debates as taking place between anti-racists and assimilationist racists. Here, Vitalis puts it in the IR academic context and it's very interesting to see how it plays out.
So, Vitalis gives us all of this and ties it to letters and diaries and long-lost articles and manuscripts; he has dug ingeniously and excavated some gems. That said, the book is SO hard to read. It's unclear down to the very sentences. The switchbacks cause intellectual whiplash. The lack of continuity is befuddling. The players' agendas and goals are hard to follow, especially when, as in the case of Ralph Bunche, for example, they seem to change over time, and depending on which work is being read in what light. Lost Black IR academics are named in one sentence with no follow-up in the next. He also sometimes positions himself as the racists he decries, which is strange when reading. Early on, for example, he writes: "Americans scored high on the 'tests of superiority' except in the South because of the presence there 'of several millions of an inferior race.' What would sustain the Americans was 'pride of blood' and 'an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races,' which secured white men of North America freedom 'from the ball and chain of hybridism'..." etc.
Overall, I not only recommend this book, I assigned it to my students, warts and all, because we all too often take IR as we get it, without looking critically at its evolution, its roots, the roots of the assumptions underpinning it, the nature and privileges and beliefs of the individuals who founded it, not to mention the people who were left out of it, with all the implications of that absence. In the end, reading about the racism that for so long infused IR as a practice and a discipline (and arguably continues to do so) allows students to recognize IR itself as a construct, to think about how and why it was built the way it was, to consider its relationship to global politics, and to recognize their own responsibilities in the discipline.
September 3, 2022
I liked this book not necessarily bc I totally agree with the argument or see it as a completely fleshed out book but because it is so darn thought provoking. Vitalis unpacks the history of the international relations discipline and shows that in its first several decades (starting in the late 19th century) IR was highly focused on interracial relations (as in the white races/nations of the world and the colonized world) and highly implicated in imperialism. The main concern of the discipline for key early figures like Lothrop Stoddard was how to manage the "rising tide of color;" that was the primary dilemma of international politics. Journals examined "race development," among other issues that framed race as the primary demarcation of world politics, and there was of course tremendous fear that too much immigration would dilute the strength of the US and the West. This carried over among theorists like Stefan Possony into the age of decolonization, which many IR folks and right-wingers interpreted as a crisis for the West.
Overall, this is a very interesting alternative history of IR (one that the discipline is often unaware of or has sought to bury), but that's not the whole story. The other side of this book is the Howard School of INternational Politics, an anti-colonial set of scholars stemming from Howard University in DC. They featured people DuBois, Locke, Merze Tate, Ray Logan, and Ralph Bunche. They examined international politics from the twin perspective of a suppressed race and a colonized people. From their vantage point, the defining fact of international politics was not anarchy but hierarchy, the existing hierarchies of race and imperialism. They attempted to critique imperialism (including US empire) from within the discipline but rarely received enough institutional inclusion or support to make much of a difference. Their critiques were picked up by later scholars in the 20th century but often without any awareness of their predecessors.
I thought it was fascinating to rethink international politics from the assumption of a hierarchy, although this hierarchy was something historically created, not necessarily a fixture of global politics (as anarchy most likely is). It certainly makes you rethink many of the assumptions build into both realist and liberal IR theories. To what extent do those just reflect a white imperial perspective on the world? I tend to think that the anarchic nature of international politics shapes the behavior of all states, but certainly the long history of imperialism has not been integrated into the study of IR very much. Moreover, IR tends to freeze out "soft" perspectives like gender, culture, and race in order to preserve some of its theoretical purity. That might be why it remains a very white field and why many of the perspectives from "critical" approaches haven't much broken through. I remember being frustrated in many of my IR seminars by not being allowed, in a sense, to bring in gender, culture, race, etc. This book mixes all those things into the field in important ways.
However, it isn't perfect. A lot of times the chapters feel a bit disconnected from each other. Much of the content is about institution building and the specific publications of early IR theorists. Some of these pop and are interesting (Stoddard, DuBois, Locke), but others are harder to trace over time. The critique of IR theory is also under-developed. Does this mean we need to replace the main textbooks? Are central figures like Morgenthau, Carr, Kennan, and so on implicated in the hidden racial history of the discipline? Is the international system not anarchic, not a self-help system, etc? It's important to recognize that the nation-state system that IR takes as foundational is relatively new historically, but can't you apply many of the same basic insights to the behavior of empires or other polities?
Vitalis is better at getting us to ask more critical questions of the field and of world politics than he is at putting forth a fully developed critique. But if you are in IR, this is absolutely worth a read and probably the best critical IR book I have read since Bananas, Beaches, and Bases.
Overall, this is a very interesting alternative history of IR (one that the discipline is often unaware of or has sought to bury), but that's not the whole story. The other side of this book is the Howard School of INternational Politics, an anti-colonial set of scholars stemming from Howard University in DC. They featured people DuBois, Locke, Merze Tate, Ray Logan, and Ralph Bunche. They examined international politics from the twin perspective of a suppressed race and a colonized people. From their vantage point, the defining fact of international politics was not anarchy but hierarchy, the existing hierarchies of race and imperialism. They attempted to critique imperialism (including US empire) from within the discipline but rarely received enough institutional inclusion or support to make much of a difference. Their critiques were picked up by later scholars in the 20th century but often without any awareness of their predecessors.
I thought it was fascinating to rethink international politics from the assumption of a hierarchy, although this hierarchy was something historically created, not necessarily a fixture of global politics (as anarchy most likely is). It certainly makes you rethink many of the assumptions build into both realist and liberal IR theories. To what extent do those just reflect a white imperial perspective on the world? I tend to think that the anarchic nature of international politics shapes the behavior of all states, but certainly the long history of imperialism has not been integrated into the study of IR very much. Moreover, IR tends to freeze out "soft" perspectives like gender, culture, and race in order to preserve some of its theoretical purity. That might be why it remains a very white field and why many of the perspectives from "critical" approaches haven't much broken through. I remember being frustrated in many of my IR seminars by not being allowed, in a sense, to bring in gender, culture, race, etc. This book mixes all those things into the field in important ways.
However, it isn't perfect. A lot of times the chapters feel a bit disconnected from each other. Much of the content is about institution building and the specific publications of early IR theorists. Some of these pop and are interesting (Stoddard, DuBois, Locke), but others are harder to trace over time. The critique of IR theory is also under-developed. Does this mean we need to replace the main textbooks? Are central figures like Morgenthau, Carr, Kennan, and so on implicated in the hidden racial history of the discipline? Is the international system not anarchic, not a self-help system, etc? It's important to recognize that the nation-state system that IR takes as foundational is relatively new historically, but can't you apply many of the same basic insights to the behavior of empires or other polities?
Vitalis is better at getting us to ask more critical questions of the field and of world politics than he is at putting forth a fully developed critique. But if you are in IR, this is absolutely worth a read and probably the best critical IR book I have read since Bananas, Beaches, and Bases.
September 7, 2022
In as much as this is the start of a lost history of the Howard school of international relations it's also a history of international relations that the field has lost to itself. Lay readers (raises hand) may find themselves grasping for the context to make many sections connect to anything meaningful. Nonetheless there are some real sturdy pegs from more recent history to hang one's hat upon.
The book is introduced by Vitalis as being inspired by his discovery in the archives that the flagship journal of international relations, Foreign Policy, was originally titled The Journal of Race Development. Vitalis nails the roots of "realism" on the early 20th century white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, who complained "We are hated for our tariffs and our immigration laws; for our tourists, our films, and," prophesying the coming of Adorno, "our jazz."
Stoddard's contemporary scholar Fred Schumann looked down -- borrowing Raymond Leslie Buell's trope as "an observer from Mars" -- and discounted, in 1941, the "pseudo-scientific rationalizations" and "biological myths" of racism. He faced hostile reactions from his fellow academics as well as the Hearst media empire as a "fellow traveler" [p.91]. While a few white scholars join him on the right side of history, Vitalis documents a string of horrors as the field ignores, rejects, and buries the work of minorities: "No African American scholar was invited to join any of the private postwar planning projects at Carnegie, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Princeton. [p.109]"
Vitalis then documents the atrocities in the field as the cultural Cold War gets underway: the postwar period when the CIA and FBI infiltrated, co-opted, founded, funded, bribed, and otherwise interfered in popular and academic culture.
After a section about CIA backing various associations and exchange student programs centered on Africa in the 50s and 60s -- the exchange students would always be white South Africans, with board members like Edwin Munger making racist jokes about "Gonorheans" -- there's an attempt to create a separate and not remotely equal research association of Blacks, the "American Society for African Culture", so there'd be at least one that didn't hang a 'whites only' sign at their door and could be used as chaff against criticisms of American apartheid.
The founders of ASAC help organize The First World Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956 and the CIA funded a delegation to attend the meeting:
James Baldwin! You have to wonder how many intellectuals the CIA was using for its own propaganda that weren't under simultaneous investigation by the FBI.
This segues neatly into a discussion of reactions to Harold Isaacs' other works:
Mankind Quarterly was the source for much of the 'research' utilized in longtime National Review contributor Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve", which argued that welfare and education spending on African Americans was just pouring good money after bad: rehashing virtually the same argument as 1963's The Geography of Intellect, which, as Charles Lane long ago pointed out, was obvious from the footnotes.
Perhaps,
Vitalis refrains from reaching for that low hanging fruit, instead finding the threads of white supremacy interwoven with euphemism in contemporary scholarship:
The denouement on the Howard School, with its brief biographical sketch of the career of Merze Tate (African Americans are never allowed to feel human until they leave America: "Tate recalled her time in Santiniketan the way [Alain] Locke remembered Paris: "That period that I spent in India, I felt more like a human being, valued for my worth than any time in my life."" [p.165]), reiterates a constant refrain throughout the book: new approaches in international relations frequently and un-self-consciously retrace the contours of past debates in the field's own forgotten past.
The book is introduced by Vitalis as being inspired by his discovery in the archives that the flagship journal of international relations, Foreign Policy, was originally titled The Journal of Race Development. Vitalis nails the roots of "realism" on the early 20th century white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, who complained "We are hated for our tariffs and our immigration laws; for our tourists, our films, and," prophesying the coming of Adorno, "our jazz."
Stoddard's contemporary scholar Fred Schumann looked down -- borrowing Raymond Leslie Buell's trope as "an observer from Mars" -- and discounted, in 1941, the "pseudo-scientific rationalizations" and "biological myths" of racism. He faced hostile reactions from his fellow academics as well as the Hearst media empire as a "fellow traveler" [p.91]. While a few white scholars join him on the right side of history, Vitalis documents a string of horrors as the field ignores, rejects, and buries the work of minorities: "No African American scholar was invited to join any of the private postwar planning projects at Carnegie, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Princeton. [p.109]"
Vitalis then documents the atrocities in the field as the cultural Cold War gets underway: the postwar period when the CIA and FBI infiltrated, co-opted, founded, funded, bribed, and otherwise interfered in popular and academic culture.
After a section about CIA backing various associations and exchange student programs centered on Africa in the 50s and 60s -- the exchange students would always be white South Africans, with board members like Edwin Munger making racist jokes about "Gonorheans" -- there's an attempt to create a separate and not remotely equal research association of Blacks, the "American Society for African Culture", so there'd be at least one that didn't hang a 'whites only' sign at their door and could be used as chaff against criticisms of American apartheid.
The founders of ASAC help organize The First World Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956 and the CIA funded a delegation to attend the meeting:
a message was read to the packed hall from W.E.B. Du Bois. "I am not present at your meeting because the U.S. government will not give me a passport. Any American Negro traveling abroad today must either not care about Negroes or say what the State Department wishes him to say." Du Bois then went on to warn the assembly not to be "betrayed backwards by the U.S. into colonialism." As James Baldwin, who was in the packed hall that evening, later wrote, Du Bois had "neatly compromised whatever effectiveness the five-man American delegation then sitting in the hall might have hoped to have." That same American group, which later founded the American Society for African Culture with CIA backing, channeled funds to the Paris group, published its own journal, rented high-end office space and a guest apartment, and ran annual conferences and cultural exchange tours. It attained the height of its influence in the early 1960s when it opened its own cultural center in Lagos.
[Rayford] Logan [asked] "Who is pulling the strings of these organizations that are interested in Africa?" He discussed his suspicions at greater length with his confidant Harold Isaacs, unaware that the latter worked at a center that itself was the creation of the CIA.... it was around this time that Isaacs interviewed the writer Ralph Ellison, who refused to have anything to do with the American Society for African Culture because its "racial approach to culture" was a form of "fakery and a backward step." Ellison guessed that it was "probably the State Department's idea... because of the way they operate.
James Baldwin! You have to wonder how many intellectuals the CIA was using for its own propaganda that weren't under simultaneous investigation by the FBI.
This segues neatly into a discussion of reactions to Harold Isaacs' other works:
The harshest criticism of [Harold R Isaacs' 1963] The New World of Negro Americans, in print at least, appeared not in any African American or Pan-African publication but instead in the new Mankind Quarterly. Launched in London in 1960, the journal mixed eugenics research and politics. According to its principal editors and writers, the western scientific enterprise had come under the "political domination" of "liberals, Communists, and Jews," who had conspired to suppress the truth of biological bases of white supremacy. Nathaniel Weyl, a frequent contributor in those years to both Mankind Quarterly and William F. Buckley's National Review, panned The New World of Negro Americans in his characteristically tendentious style on grounds that were familiar from the era of the Journal of Race Development [now Foreign Affairs]. He argued that the worst of Isaac's many failings was his incomprehension of the "biogenetic adaptation to specific habitats" (temperate/Caucasoid, hot/Negroid, cold/Mongoloid) that made any idea of nonwhites collectively opposing white domination impossible. On the plus side, it was probably the case that the kind of tensions between African Americans and Africans Isaacs described had developed because "the Negro intellectual is typically far more Caucasoid in his genetic makeup."
Three years later, Weyl collaborated with Austrian emigre strategic studies scholar Stefan Possony to analyze the implications of the biological inferiority of Africans and African Americans, or "Melanoids," for the Cold War world order. The Geography of Intellect used the old arguments on interdependence (except that the terminology had changed to globalization) to ground a defense of eugenics. Intelligence had emerged as a vital strategic resource in short supply that required careful shepherding in accordance with iron laws of climate and mental endowments (lots of geniuses in the temperate zones, none in the tropics). Unfortunately, the policies that were currently in place and were informed by "academic sects," that is, the disciplines of sociology and social psychology, which long ago had abandoned disinterested search for scientific truth in a campaign to destroy basic American values and institutions, were producing dysgenic outcomes ... locally and globally.
The attack on integration efforts in the United States was one he had made before, but Possony, doubtless unconsciously, had returned to the roots of American international relations in focusing on the catastrophes unfolding globally as a result of the misguided efforts of the United States to "destroy colonialism" and spend foreign aid dollars on those who were least well-endowed genetically: The "average African Negro functions as does the European after a leucotomy [prefrontal lobotomy] operation," while "we" contribute to "genocide" of the white race there. ... "The accretion of lethal power in the hands of nation states dominated by populations incapable of rational thought could be a harbinger of total disaster."
The same "eugenicists" Weyl and Possony championed in The Geography of Intellect hailed the book in Mankind Quarterly and the right's two standard bearers, The National Review and Modern Age. [pp.151-153]
Mankind Quarterly was the source for much of the 'research' utilized in longtime National Review contributor Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve", which argued that welfare and education spending on African Americans was just pouring good money after bad: rehashing virtually the same argument as 1963's The Geography of Intellect, which, as Charles Lane long ago pointed out, was obvious from the footnotes.
Perhaps,
As Charles Lindblom, a former president of the American Political Science Association, concluded, while some political scientists believe themselves to be engaged in "scientific inquiry" the enterprise is better understood as an "endless debate." [p.169]
Vitalis refrains from reaching for that low hanging fruit, instead finding the threads of white supremacy interwoven with euphemism in contemporary scholarship:
Thinkers such as Mahan, Bryce, and Adams, whom [G. John] Ikenberry describes as the intellectual sources of American liberal hegemony, were, as we saw, among the country's great racial supremacists [p.178]
The denouement on the Howard School, with its brief biographical sketch of the career of Merze Tate (African Americans are never allowed to feel human until they leave America: "Tate recalled her time in Santiniketan the way [Alain] Locke remembered Paris: "That period that I spent in India, I felt more like a human being, valued for my worth than any time in my life."" [p.165]), reiterates a constant refrain throughout the book: new approaches in international relations frequently and un-self-consciously retrace the contours of past debates in the field's own forgotten past.
July 29, 2020
This is an incredibly important book. The core of the book is an effort to undermine the story American International Relations scholars tell themselves (and their students) about the origins of the discipline. The discipline, Vitalis convincingly argues, did not emerge in the post-WWII focus on power politics and 'Realism.' Instead, the discipline has a much longer history; one connected to debates regarding race (and the promotion of white supremacy), colonialism, and imperialism. In a similar fashion, the centrality of the sovereignty and that of anarchy in the origins of IR should be questioned. At its origins, IR was focused on dynamics of hierarchy and domination (among races), not anarchy, and on race and (always looming) race wars more than states and sovereignty. Even more importantly, Vitalis shows how concepts like 'anarchy' became codes to reproduce old understanding of the supremacy of the white race (now relabelled 'great powers') over 'backward' ones. Here, the last chapters of the book strongly and correctly criticises some of the most famous contemporary frameworks (e.g. clash of civilisations, the coming anarchy, liberal leviathan) for (unconsciously?) reproducing old racist tropes, forgetting violence and domination, or sticking new labels on old 'racist' wine bottles.
Having established these origins, the book traces how these original contributions were conveniently "forgotten" by American IR scholars. This process of forgiving, Vitalis suggests, also extended to the complete erasure of the contributions made by IR scholars affiliated to Howard University and, today, completely forgotten in the 'traditional' (and traditionally white) curriculum. These scholars - in spite of confronting the ostracism of their white colleagues as well as the contempt of many funding institutions - raised critical voices against racism, imperialism, and US foreign policy.
In this short book, several other teams emerge: the powerful role of private foundations in bankrolling the discipline; the role of the Cold War and McCarthyism in stifling dissent; prejudice against women of colour; and a fleeting analysis of the work done by several IR scholars.
Here is perhaps the main problem of the book. In my view, too many issues are raised, too many authors discussed, too many connections identified. Many of these are lost along the way and several simply confuse the account. The book would have benefited from a clearer structure (either more explicitly chronological, or more focused on authors and their contributions as opposed to an odd mix of the two) and from more clarity regarding its main message (perhaps sacrificing some of the detail about foundations, affiliations, grants, academic organisations). Similarly, the theoretical contributions of scholars affiliated to Howard University are rarely given enough space. Some characters make frequent appearances but a full account of their views and the evolution of their thought is rarely provided.
This being said, the book represents an angry (at times sarcastic) wake-up call for the discipline of IR and those who teach it. Vitalis likens the process to 'reverse engineering' in this interesting symposium on the book (https://thedisorderofthings.com/2016/...). IR is after all what professors teach, what academics present at conferences, what they 'save' for posterity, what they wilfully suppress, and what they decide to forget. Incidentally, the original myths of IR are somewhat different in the UK. In the UK, the focus is more on the birth of IR after WWI as an effort to better educate policymakers and the public and, as a consequence, end war. A similar effort could be made regarding the 'truer' origins of IR in the UK. Such effort would be likely to find a similar (perhaps even stronger) link to empire, colonialism, and racist ideas.
Having established these origins, the book traces how these original contributions were conveniently "forgotten" by American IR scholars. This process of forgiving, Vitalis suggests, also extended to the complete erasure of the contributions made by IR scholars affiliated to Howard University and, today, completely forgotten in the 'traditional' (and traditionally white) curriculum. These scholars - in spite of confronting the ostracism of their white colleagues as well as the contempt of many funding institutions - raised critical voices against racism, imperialism, and US foreign policy.
In this short book, several other teams emerge: the powerful role of private foundations in bankrolling the discipline; the role of the Cold War and McCarthyism in stifling dissent; prejudice against women of colour; and a fleeting analysis of the work done by several IR scholars.
Here is perhaps the main problem of the book. In my view, too many issues are raised, too many authors discussed, too many connections identified. Many of these are lost along the way and several simply confuse the account. The book would have benefited from a clearer structure (either more explicitly chronological, or more focused on authors and their contributions as opposed to an odd mix of the two) and from more clarity regarding its main message (perhaps sacrificing some of the detail about foundations, affiliations, grants, academic organisations). Similarly, the theoretical contributions of scholars affiliated to Howard University are rarely given enough space. Some characters make frequent appearances but a full account of their views and the evolution of their thought is rarely provided.
This being said, the book represents an angry (at times sarcastic) wake-up call for the discipline of IR and those who teach it. Vitalis likens the process to 'reverse engineering' in this interesting symposium on the book (https://thedisorderofthings.com/2016/...). IR is after all what professors teach, what academics present at conferences, what they 'save' for posterity, what they wilfully suppress, and what they decide to forget. Incidentally, the original myths of IR are somewhat different in the UK. In the UK, the focus is more on the birth of IR after WWI as an effort to better educate policymakers and the public and, as a consequence, end war. A similar effort could be made regarding the 'truer' origins of IR in the UK. Such effort would be likely to find a similar (perhaps even stronger) link to empire, colonialism, and racist ideas.
November 18, 2023
This is one of the worst written good books I have come across in a long time.
As an exercise in archival archeology it is a marvel, digging up a cast of fascinating characters and reconstructing their dusty little lives. It's like Dark Academia but real, and with actual stakes, as imperialist scholars construct the nascent discipline ofcolonial administration International Relations in order to more efficiently prop up white supremacy at home and abroad, only to be bamboozled by the astonishing work of the Howard School, a sharp-witted team of black scholars who had somehow wedged themselves through the institutional cracks of 1920s academia.
Alas, their works were buried. McCarthyism wore them down, their radicalism blunted over the years as they tried to fit in, and when that didn't work the CIA got involved to confiscate their passports to prevent them attending the international conferences they were secretly bankrolling anyway.
And then IR forgot all about them.
New authors entered the scene and began reinventing ideas that had already been discovered, albeit with less honesty about the racial hierarchies of the international systems they studied. After WW2, whilst the legendary, conventionally canonical scholars that defined the field were penning their defences of Cold War hegemony, their peers learned to stop openly relying on Scientific Racism, and figured out less perspicuous euphemisms for those concepts: "Civilisation" replaced "race", "cultural heritage" replaced "racial hereditary", and "centuries of tradition" replaced "racial instincts."
With a discipline like this, it's no wonder that Huntington was so recently able to publish his 'Clash of Civilisations' theory with a straight face.
Cracking stuff so far, but by all that is wretched, Vitalis, was this a first draft?!?! This book has the all the structure of a Jackson Pollock painting. Chapters are haphazard, sentences barely connect to one another, and characters and brought in without introduction, thrown out, forgotten, then introduced properly 50 pages later in relation to new figures, or maybe old ones, with no strict chronology or overarching framework to give a cohesive structure to this history.
Vitalis is obviously passionate about the archival sources he uncovers and clearly wants to get as much of it out in the open as possible. The random facts and casual follow ups he is able to include about the lives and fates of throwaway figures, or the exact attendances of conferences, or private letters and diaries discussing academic squabbles are astonishing for their comprehensiveness, and in their more riveting moments occasionally achieve the high drama of a campus novel. But they are thrown together with a disorienting arbitrariness. If anything, the text reads more like a research notebook than a disciplinary history. I understand that the world is chaotic and random, filled with dozens of different lives that only barely cross over one another in a way that makes writing the history of a discipline dizzying and hyper-complex and full of so many sprawling tangents and cross-threads and dead-ends and gaps... but... well... the reader doesn't need to see all that. Those infinite threads are what footnotes are for, as well as extended bibliographies, literature reviews, concordances, encyclopaedias, and group biographies.
Cynical as it is to say, history is more art than science, and an intelligent reader can understand that fact without having to see every individual squished protein shoved into the sausage as it's being made. As Keats knew, truth has its own elegance, and a historian should know how to select and present their data in such a way as to bring forward its most fundamental elements, thereby revealing the pattern they wish to uncover within the infinitely complex tangle of our jumbled past without obscuring the nuances and contradictions that will inevitably apply moderating pushback and pressure to any argument actually worth making. Form matters as much in history as it does in any other art. If it didn't we'd just read bullet points and timelines.
The real world is chaos, but we use theory to construct order that allows us interpret that sprawling weave one thread at a time, plucking out a string to understand its connections and trajectories before releasing it, selecting another lens, and plucking at the fabric again.
There's danger in acknowledging that fact, so close does it come to condoning the kind of gross narrativisation I despise in simplistic, non-sociological histories, but I rarely come across a book so important as to make that caveat necessary. Vitalis' argument is far too well founded for it to be buried within such a gory mess of mangled paragraphs. It's horrifying, bleak, and should make any IR scholar angry at their discipline, but it's hard to recommend when it feels like half the archival digging still needs to be done by the reader to figure out what the hell Vitalis is arguing at any given point.
It's not even like his sentences are unclear - his prose is clean as a whistle - it's the construction of his narrative and the persistent shatter-scatter of irrelevant, disconnected, disarranged detail at any given point that's the problem.
I suppose in its own way that's at least a novel problem for an academic to have!
As an exercise in archival archeology it is a marvel, digging up a cast of fascinating characters and reconstructing their dusty little lives. It's like Dark Academia but real, and with actual stakes, as imperialist scholars construct the nascent discipline of
Alas, their works were buried. McCarthyism wore them down, their radicalism blunted over the years as they tried to fit in, and when that didn't work the CIA got involved to confiscate their passports to prevent them attending the international conferences they were secretly bankrolling anyway.
And then IR forgot all about them.
New authors entered the scene and began reinventing ideas that had already been discovered, albeit with less honesty about the racial hierarchies of the international systems they studied. After WW2, whilst the legendary, conventionally canonical scholars that defined the field were penning their defences of Cold War hegemony, their peers learned to stop openly relying on Scientific Racism, and figured out less perspicuous euphemisms for those concepts: "Civilisation" replaced "race", "cultural heritage" replaced "racial hereditary", and "centuries of tradition" replaced "racial instincts."
With a discipline like this, it's no wonder that Huntington was so recently able to publish his 'Clash of Civilisations' theory with a straight face.
Cracking stuff so far, but by all that is wretched, Vitalis, was this a first draft?!?! This book has the all the structure of a Jackson Pollock painting. Chapters are haphazard, sentences barely connect to one another, and characters and brought in without introduction, thrown out, forgotten, then introduced properly 50 pages later in relation to new figures, or maybe old ones, with no strict chronology or overarching framework to give a cohesive structure to this history.
Vitalis is obviously passionate about the archival sources he uncovers and clearly wants to get as much of it out in the open as possible. The random facts and casual follow ups he is able to include about the lives and fates of throwaway figures, or the exact attendances of conferences, or private letters and diaries discussing academic squabbles are astonishing for their comprehensiveness, and in their more riveting moments occasionally achieve the high drama of a campus novel. But they are thrown together with a disorienting arbitrariness. If anything, the text reads more like a research notebook than a disciplinary history. I understand that the world is chaotic and random, filled with dozens of different lives that only barely cross over one another in a way that makes writing the history of a discipline dizzying and hyper-complex and full of so many sprawling tangents and cross-threads and dead-ends and gaps... but... well... the reader doesn't need to see all that. Those infinite threads are what footnotes are for, as well as extended bibliographies, literature reviews, concordances, encyclopaedias, and group biographies.
Cynical as it is to say, history is more art than science, and an intelligent reader can understand that fact without having to see every individual squished protein shoved into the sausage as it's being made. As Keats knew, truth has its own elegance, and a historian should know how to select and present their data in such a way as to bring forward its most fundamental elements, thereby revealing the pattern they wish to uncover within the infinitely complex tangle of our jumbled past without obscuring the nuances and contradictions that will inevitably apply moderating pushback and pressure to any argument actually worth making. Form matters as much in history as it does in any other art. If it didn't we'd just read bullet points and timelines.
The real world is chaos, but we use theory to construct order that allows us interpret that sprawling weave one thread at a time, plucking out a string to understand its connections and trajectories before releasing it, selecting another lens, and plucking at the fabric again.
There's danger in acknowledging that fact, so close does it come to condoning the kind of gross narrativisation I despise in simplistic, non-sociological histories, but I rarely come across a book so important as to make that caveat necessary. Vitalis' argument is far too well founded for it to be buried within such a gory mess of mangled paragraphs. It's horrifying, bleak, and should make any IR scholar angry at their discipline, but it's hard to recommend when it feels like half the archival digging still needs to be done by the reader to figure out what the hell Vitalis is arguing at any given point.
It's not even like his sentences are unclear - his prose is clean as a whistle - it's the construction of his narrative and the persistent shatter-scatter of irrelevant, disconnected, disarranged detail at any given point that's the problem.
I suppose in its own way that's at least a novel problem for an academic to have!
April 15, 2024
It's thought provoking to some degree. Vitalis essentially makes the argument that International Relations as a discipline was founded on the study of race relations, specifically how to maintain white hegemony within the international world order. It has been only recently that IR has shifted towards the study of interaction between states and actors (full disclosure, I do not feel he adequately proved this point in his book). Due to IR's racialized foundation, many of the core concepts and theories within IR continue to perpetuate white supremacy.
The quality of his evidence for his claims goes back and forth between really well researched critiques and incendiary claims with no attempt to support them. One such example of an incendiary remark made early in the book was as follows, "...self-identified white professors sought to understand, explain, and improve the world's stock of inferior beings and thus allegedly avert political and biological catastrophe." (Pg. 9). That's quite the claim to make about an entire field of study, yet Vitalis offered no evidence either within the text or within footnotes to support that claim. I assume he believed that the circumstantial evidence of low rates of tenured black professors, the advent of race relations as a sub-discpline with IR, and the mere existence of colonial political powers reinforced his claim; I am obviously skeptical and would have perferred a more measured assertion.
I appreciate critical scholars, and more specifically this work in particular, because they force us to not take things for granted. We ought to critically examine axioms and assumptions. We ought to call ourselves to account for our past indiscretions and failures. The field of IR likely produced racist scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since it drew upon a population of people where racialized prejudices existed. Black intellectuals have likely suffered undue obstacles in advancement within the field and may very well still face challenges based solely based on their skin color. Though, as a stated earlier, I am not convinced of the "original sin" concept that IR is now inherently tainted with racist thought/structures.
Critical theorists, and Vitalis is no exception, often hyperfocus on the failures of whatever phenomenon or institution they are critically examining and seemingly neglect to examine any positive attributes, progession, or valuable contributions made by it. Vitalis appears to be a proverbial hammer and views everything as a racist nail. Sometimes he aptly points to a racist thing and hits the nail on the head. Other times he forces a phenomenon to fit awkwardly within the racist box.
The quality of his evidence for his claims goes back and forth between really well researched critiques and incendiary claims with no attempt to support them. One such example of an incendiary remark made early in the book was as follows, "...self-identified white professors sought to understand, explain, and improve the world's stock of inferior beings and thus allegedly avert political and biological catastrophe." (Pg. 9). That's quite the claim to make about an entire field of study, yet Vitalis offered no evidence either within the text or within footnotes to support that claim. I assume he believed that the circumstantial evidence of low rates of tenured black professors, the advent of race relations as a sub-discpline with IR, and the mere existence of colonial political powers reinforced his claim; I am obviously skeptical and would have perferred a more measured assertion.
I appreciate critical scholars, and more specifically this work in particular, because they force us to not take things for granted. We ought to critically examine axioms and assumptions. We ought to call ourselves to account for our past indiscretions and failures. The field of IR likely produced racist scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since it drew upon a population of people where racialized prejudices existed. Black intellectuals have likely suffered undue obstacles in advancement within the field and may very well still face challenges based solely based on their skin color. Though, as a stated earlier, I am not convinced of the "original sin" concept that IR is now inherently tainted with racist thought/structures.
Critical theorists, and Vitalis is no exception, often hyperfocus on the failures of whatever phenomenon or institution they are critically examining and seemingly neglect to examine any positive attributes, progession, or valuable contributions made by it. Vitalis appears to be a proverbial hammer and views everything as a racist nail. Sometimes he aptly points to a racist thing and hits the nail on the head. Other times he forces a phenomenon to fit awkwardly within the racist box.
June 12, 2021
This is primarily a work of history tracing the role of racism in the development of the field of international relations and the practice of U.S. foreign policy. Readers may sometimes find themselves lost in the detail -- Vitalis covers a lot of ground in a work that mostly focuses on the last century (primarily 1900 to the 1970s). He discusses many individuals that will be unfamiliar, including numerous scholars of color whose work was (and is still) typically ignored by the mainstream. However, he also discusses the key individuals who founded or worked at prominent institutions in both academia and the private (think tank) research sector. Despite their prominent roles, many are also mostly forgotten now. In any case, I found his argument quite convincing,
The critique he offers about power and imperial policy is a point that has been addressed by an array of critical IR scholars in the past few decades. Mostly, he ignores that work, though it admittedly only rarely employs race as the primary analytical lens. Nonetheless, those scholars are allies and will be sympathetic to this work given the shared understanding of how major powers like the US typically behave in world politics.
Unfortunately, because of pandemic/Zoom teaching commitments, there were long stretches through the spring semester when I had to set this book aside. That does not reflect on its importance. If I were teaching doctoral students, I would want all of them to read this book, along side Ido Oren's excellent Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (also on Cornell UP, 2003). Vitalis references Oren in the text, btw.
The critique he offers about power and imperial policy is a point that has been addressed by an array of critical IR scholars in the past few decades. Mostly, he ignores that work, though it admittedly only rarely employs race as the primary analytical lens. Nonetheless, those scholars are allies and will be sympathetic to this work given the shared understanding of how major powers like the US typically behave in world politics.
Unfortunately, because of pandemic/Zoom teaching commitments, there were long stretches through the spring semester when I had to set this book aside. That does not reflect on its importance. If I were teaching doctoral students, I would want all of them to read this book, along side Ido Oren's excellent Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (also on Cornell UP, 2003). Vitalis references Oren in the text, btw.
January 20, 2022
This is a book I admire greatly for its central criticism of the history of IR and the exclusion of crucial black scholars from contemporary teaching of the field but ultimately don't love due to the fact it introduces an over-abundance of scholars and works that become very hard to keep track of. A brilliantly-researched and expertly-argued book that is difficult to get through due to the nature of the subject matter.
March 10, 2024
I did not enjoy the format that this book was written in. I think that this book could have been done so much better. I am interested in the main idea of the book and some of the information in the book, but because of how it was organized/presented it was hard to get through.
I read this book for a Foreign Policy class.
I read this book for a Foreign Policy class.
November 2, 2019
Brilliant recovery of the forgotten genealogy of a discipline! Should be required reading for anyone studying International Relations (or Foreign Policy History). I wish we had this book when I was a grad student.
November 14, 2023
I would say that this should be required reading for anyone studying international relations (and political science more generally, really!) Proves the impact of the racist & colonial origins of the discipline and provides fascinating insight into the field.
October 12, 2017
I would agree with what a previous reviewer said about the difficulty of keeping all of the different threads and shifting positions clear in this history of the subfield of international relations. However, I still award the book five stars because I think that the major themes are really important. First, the reality of hierarchy in the international system is either completely unacknowledged, or treated as the natural 'order of things,' in most mainstream international relations research, rather than as the result of historical processes and conscious design. It seems that most American IR scholars feel that hierarchy isn't really a big deal because the 'countries that matter' (i.e. the wealthy countries) largely acquiesce to American power, ignoring the ways in which the US has used military force, covert action, and economic pressure to coerce countries in the global south. As a graduate student in comparative politics, I see similar blind spots at work in my subfield, although I think that there is a greater recognition that hierarchy can have insalubrious effects on political and economic development. Secondly, in bringing to light the ideas of the Howard school scholars, and the challenges they faced to gain recognition in a largely white world, we see how structures of white supremacy have had an enduring effect on the types of ideas that get produced and perspectives that attention is paid to. Political scientists need to reflect on how these factors continue to shape knowledge creation in our discipline today. Finally, one thing that came through loud and clear to me throughout the book was that the so-called 'scientific' branches of political science (IR, comparative, American politics) have not evolved in a social and political vacuum, according to some teleological path of increasing methodological sophistication and theoretical precision. The very structures of power that political scientists are supposed to study also shape the types of research that we produce. If scholars continue to complacently accept or willfully ignore this reality, we'll continue being handmaids of imperialism.
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July 15, 2016327.73008 V837 2015
April 2, 2017
As someone who is generally unfamiliar with International Relations discourse, this book was a huge learning experience for me. Thoroughly researched and cited, it tackles academic amnesia with respect to the role of race and empire in the early to mid twentieth century in the U.S. It is a good material account of the impact of racism on African American academics.
April 14, 2017
This book actually deserves a five star rating, but I gave it four (and almost gave it three) because it is hard to keep all the threads and position changes straight. The topic, however, deserves the attention of all of us.
April 25, 2017
Dense at times but enjoyably refreshing
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