The graceful and generous liberal gesture: Making racism invisible in american international relations

Abstract

Toni Morrison argues that a highly and historically racialised US culture today exhibits a powerful tendency toward 'silence and evasion' in matters of race. I examine the effect of this 'norm against noticing' on American International Relations theory. IR theory although increasingly concerned with the origins of international institutions, the power of norms, and the origins and course of American empire and hegemony has had virtually nothing to say about the impact of racial ideology in the construction of the modern world order. I subject various currents in American scholarship to critique and revision in two idioms: in one case theoretical, and in the other, empirically-oriented, in the course of revealing some of the 'struts and bolts' of racism as an international institution. I draw attention to three kinds of practices in particular. The first is the caste distinctions on which so called humanitarian interventions historically depended and still depend; the second is the 'strategic' white supremacist rationales on which opposition to US expansionism once rested; and the third is the system of American apartheid (Jim Crow) which was exported from the United States to the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia as expansionism gained new ground at the turn-of-the-century. © Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2000.