A book was published in 2015 called White World Order, Black World Power by Robert Vitalis. Professor Vitalis accidentally happened upon some information that ultimately caused him to write this book (find a review of this book in the London Review of Books here and one in Black Perspectives in AAIHS here). The names W.E.B. duBois, Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, and (to a much lesser extent) Merze Tate are known as giants in academia and were the foundation for what Vitalis calls the Howard School (as in a particular school of thought and
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| Merze Tate at Oxford 1935 |
philosophy). What had been lost to history was the extraordinary role these thinkers/scholars played in the formation of the field of International Relations and therefore the foundation of US foreign policy. While they were brushed aside as the field developed, their research, interests, and publications in race relations and “race development” were a challenge to their white contemporaries.
The issues of segregation, racial equality, colonialism, imperialism, paternalism, isolationism, “social and cultural Darwinism”, and international racial parity all played a role in both domestic and international policy. These academics and thinkers forced their white counterparts (not necessarily successfully) to consider where they stood on various combinations of the above “isms” and Vitalis demonstrates how the white academics and thinkers moved from and through various positions as they were forced to acknowledge (some of) the ideas of the black thinkers. What is very clear is the racist underpinnings of US foreign policy and how this grew out of the history of slavery, colonialism, and the mercantilism of resource development.