U.S policies aimed at eliminating inequality are rooted in violent pursuits of hegemony, endeavors at “saving face” in order to solidify their global power and forward transnational capitalism.

To that end, it is critical to conceive racial liberalism and U.S. global ascendancy as mutually constitutive. As anticolonial and antiracist movements gained political power and visibility during World War II, they exposed racial contradictions on a global scale. Politicizing the depths and injustices of Western and white supremacy, they demonstrated that European powers and the United States claimed to be fighting an antiracist and antifascist war while practicing racism and fascism against people of color at home and in their colonies. For the first time in such a concerted manner and on a broad, international scale, anticolonial and antiracist movements linked U.S. racial and wage slavery to European colonialism. These movements condemned Western imperialisms and recognized white supremacy as an illegitimate and artificial ideology of white and European domination. As the terms of the ideological Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union gelled, racism in the United States and other Western capitalist societies became the chief propaganda weapons in the Soviet Union’s arsenal. In order to successfully define the terms of global governance after World War II, U.S. bourgeoisie classes had to manage the racial contradictions that antiracist and anticolonial movements exposed. As racial liberalism provided the logic and idiom of such management, it became an essential organizing discourse and force for U.S. postwar society and global power.

At racial liberalism’s core was a geopolitical race narrative: African American integration within U.S. society and advancement toward equality, defined through a liberal framework of legal rights and racially inclusive nationalism, would establish the moral legitimacy of U.S. global leadership. As Mary Dudziak documented, this narrative served as a governing statement for U.S. propaganda, domestic politics, and culture industries throughout the 1950s and 1960s.4 Evidence that liberal antiracism was taking hold in the United States—civil rights legal victories, black American professional achievement, waning prejudice—was to prove the superiority of American democracy over communist imposition. It would demonstrate to countries emerging from colonialism that the social relations of capitalist modernity were not hopelessly compromised by white supremacy.

For racial liberalism the incorporation of antiracism into state governmentality (the production of official antiracist discourse), with the interjection of U.S. geopolitics into fields of racial meaning, was decisive. Whereas earlier antiracisms connected to the heterogeneous struggles of people of color often linked racial and economic justice, racial liberalism sutured an official antiracism to a U.S. nationalism that bore the agency for transnational capitalism. This suture produced a liberal nationalism that normed and restricted the field of race politics to the point that antiracist discourse itself came to both deflect counternationalisms (especially in the context of early Cold War Americanism) and mask the workings of transnational capitalism. As Penny Von Eschen demonstrated in Race against Empire, leading visions of antiracism in the black public sphere in the early 1940s had been internationalist and political economic in their purview, dominated by discussions of pan-Africanism, Jim Crow imperialism in Africa, the Nigerian general strike of 1945, and the South African miners’ strike of 1946. With the ascendancy of racial liberalism and the freezing into place of Cold War repression, official liberal antiracism marginalized discussions of race, labor, and political economy as suspicious in light of American resolve against Soviet communism.