Page 144 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Beyond Nationalism
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nation of slavery created political opportunities that later allowed the African Ameri-
cans to develop the autonomous institutions and organizations that became the foun-
dation of the Black movement.
Further, the gradual emergence of the United States as the hegemonic world
power, large-scale social and economic changes that provided more political opportu-
nities for the development of indigenous institutions and organizations, and the emer-
gence of Black intellectuals—all strengthened the Black struggle for liberation. As a
result, the Black movement was able to legally dismantle racial segregation in the
1950s and the 1960s.But it fell short of removing indirect institutional racism,poverty,
and underdevelopment. Both domestic conditions and international politics were
conducive for the development of the Black struggle in the first half of the twentieth
century. During the first half of the same century, the capitalist world system faced se-
rious crises because of two world wars and the struggle of the colonized peoples.All
these factors together challenged “America’s domestic praxis of white supremacy.”
With the emergence of the U.S. as the hegemonic global power in the capitalist world
system after World War II, its racist domestic policy was exposed globally, and the U.S.
government recognized that it was increasingly difficult to overtly defend White su-
5
premacy at home. As the United States became the global power, international opin-
ion started to support the Black movement against racial segregation. Swedish 4
sociologist Gunnar Myrdal advised that “America, for its international prestige, power,
and future security,needs to demonstrate to the world that American Negroes [sic] can
be satisfactorily integrated into its democracy.” 6
The U.S. government never paid serious attention to hiding its true face of racism
prior to the time when the international media started to expose it by reporting ac-
counts of racial violence and discrimination against nonwhites, particularly against
African Americans, foreign diplomats, and visiting dignitaries from the Third World. 7
Since the Black movement made school segregation its target of legal attack in the
1940s and early 1950s, the international media also focused on it and seriously criti-
8
cized school segregation as a racist policy. Some U.S. policy makers who were not
committed to racial justice supported the efforts of the Black struggle to desegregate
school legally in 1954 because of pragmatic political interests and criticism from the
9
world audience of racial segregation. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka on school desegregation was defined as a cold war
imperative since it occurred within the politics of both the Black movement and
global political pressure. 10 Gerald Horne comments,“The fact that the Brown ruling
campaigned against international and domestic communism is one of the most over-
looked aspects of the decision.” 11
By realizing its foreign policy benefits, U.S. officials “used the Brown decision as an
impression management strategy in their attempts to convince the world that prob-
lematic race relations were regional, not national. Legally ending U.S.-sanctioned sup-
port of segregation at the national level helped redefine race relations as a regional
problem. Resistance at the state level occurred in part because state governors were
less concerned with an international audience.” 12
With the intensification of the Black movement in the 1950s and 1960s, racial
violence, police brutality, and the ugly nature of White supremacy were increasingly
reported by domestic and international media. As a result, some U.S. officials who
engaged with the world audience “supported eliminating overt, legal racial discrim-
ination in social institutions in hopes of limiting black radicalism at home and of