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

Toni Morrison argues that a highly and historically racialised US culture t oday exhibits a powerful tendency toward 'silence and evasion' in matters o f race. I examine the effect of this 'norm against noticing' on American In ternational Relations theory. IR theory although increasingly concerned wit h the origins of international institutions, the power of norms, and the or igins and course of American empire and hegemony has had virtually nothing to say about the impact of racial ideology in the construction of the moder n world order. I subject various currents in American scholarship to critiq ue and revision in two idioms: in one case theoretical, and in the other, e mpirically-oriented, in the course of revealing some of the 'struts and bol ts' of racism as an international institution. I draw attention to three ki nds of practices in particular. The first is the caste distinctions on whic h so called humanitarian interventions historically depended and still depe nd; the second is the 'strategic' white supremacist rationales on which opp osition to US expansionism once rested; and the third is the system of Amer ican 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 rum-of-the-century.