We have seen striking coverage over the last two weeks of
the global reaction to George Floyd’s murder, the protest movement, and police
violence. Yet again, people in other countries question whether the U.S. should
offer its constitutional system as a model for the world. This time, the focus
is not only on the grotesque brutality of Floyd’s killing. As reporters have
been shot at with “nonlethal” weapons by police, foreign governments have
protested that freedom of the press needs to be protected in the United States.
The impact through history of U.S. racism on world opinion,
and the way the U.S. government saw civil rights law reform as a corrective, has been widely recognized. Recent provide an occasion to
emphasize a couple of points.
In a Foreign Affairs essay, George
Floyd Moves the World: The Legacy of Racial Protest in America and the
Imperative of Reform, I tell the story of past international protest in
support of U.S. civil rights, but stress that U.S. efforts to address the
impact on the U.S. image were insufficient. They were better at temporary fixes
that aided U.S. diplomacy than rooting out the structural racism that fuel both
protest and foreign criticism.
An essay last week, The
Damage Trump Has Done This Week Extends Far Beyond America’s Borders, in
the New York Times, responds more specifically to Trump’s argument that
Minnesota protests made the state “a laughingstock all over the world,” and his
pledge to bypass governors who tolerated protest, and to use the military to
“dominate” American streets.
During the 1950s and ’60s, racism’s
damage to America’s role in the world was highlighted in the president’s daily
national security briefings. Mr. Trump, who ignores his own briefings, is not
likely to understand the ways that police violence and racial injustice hamper
American influence — and the way his own militarism could empower foreign
brutality.
By fanning the flames of
intolerance, it is the president, not the governors, who undermines his
country’s standing in the world.
There are (at least) two takeaways for today's reform
efforts. First, international engagement and pressure is a resource that the
Black Lives Matter movement can draw upon, as did the earlier civil rights
movement. Second, surface fixes intending only to shore up the U.S. image will
fail.
Derrick Bell, of course, anticipated the connections between civil rights and
foreign affairs before historians got to it. I turn to his Faces at the Bottom of the Well in Foreign Affairs:
The racism crisis in the United
States today is not one slip among others that makes the nation look weak in
the eyes of the world. Racism is a central and enduring American
characteristic, as the critical race theorist Derrick Bell insisted long ago.
Calling it out, as have millions of Americans in the past week, does not
undermine the nation by revealing its well-known failings to the rest of the
world. The world has known of these failings for centuries. Instead, the
protests are a first step toward redress. As other nations are challenged about
their own legacies of injustice, a serious U.S. reform effort could be an
example of strength worth emulating.
