White World Order, Black Power Politics - (United States in the World) by Robert Vitalis (Paperback)

About the Book

In White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.

Book Synopsis

Racism and imperialism are the twin forces that propelled the course of the United States in the world in the early twentieth century and in turn affected the way that diplomatic history and international relations were taught and understood in the American academy. Evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, and racial anthropology had been dominant doctrines in international relations from its beginnings; racist attitudes informed research priorities and were embedded in newly formed professional organizations. In White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.Within the rigidly segregated profession, the "Howard School of International Relations" represented the most important center of opposition to racism and the focal point for theorizing feasible alternatives to dependency and domination for Africans and African Americans through the early 1960s. Vitalis pairs the contributions of white and black scholars to reconstitute forgotten historical dialogues and show the critical role played by race in the formation of international relations.

Review Quotes

Defying his discipline's preference for theory over history, Vitalis has demonstrated how detailed, archive-based historical accounts can lift the veil on the racism running through international relations as field and practice.

Robert Vitalis wants his discipline to understand not only how central the category of race and the structures of racism were to its founding institutions and paradigms but also to see the erasure of that history not as progress but as repression, a willful forgetting that has if anything made it less equipped to comprehend (much less to address) the shocking racial inequities that still mark both the American and the global order. If international relations scholars want to understand the racial politics that made their field what it is today, there is no better place to begin than with this righteously angry book.

The book stands out for how it critiques how institutions reproduce, often in an unconscious manner, the foundational assumptions of an academic discipline.... Vitalis has also contributed to the vibrant and expanding scholarly study of radical Black transnational intellectual history by engaging with a largely-overlooked dimension of the work of important figures in the history of Black radical thought such as Locke, Williams and Bunche, showing how those thinkers worked within and against formal academic structures to criticize the racist and imperialist dynamics of international relations scholarship.

There is much to commend in Vitalis' book which is filled with fascinating vignettes and unexpected connections. He writes with clarity and passion, especially in the book's opening and close, to ensure that whilst ample room is given for the reader to make their own way through the material, it is never an aimless wander.

About the Author

Robert Vitalis is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier and When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt and coeditor of Counter-Narratives: History, Society and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.