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A review by buermann
White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations by Robert Vitalis
4.0
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.