Civil Rights History, Foreign Affairs, and Contemporary Public Diplomacy

It seems like a good time to reflect on the policy implications of scholarship on the relationship between civil rights and U.S. foreign relations. President Obama has recently emphasized that protecting human rights matters to the fight against terrorism. And the Council on Foreign Relations in DC will soon hold an event on the International Implications of the Civil Rights Movement. The event is not open, and discussion may go in a different direction, but below are a few points I hope to have a chance to get across.

The history of the intersection of civil rights and Cold War era U.S. foreign relations is copiously documented here and here. It took a while for American diplomats and political leaders to grasp the extent of the problem and how to address it. Here’s how they got it wrong, and then right – at least for U.S. public diplomacy:

In the late 1940s, as the U.S. hoped to encourage a newly independent India to ally with the United States, but encountered persistent criticism of U.S. racial segregation and discrimination, American diplomats in India initially made things worse. They dismissed the problem and analogized American racism to the Indian caste system, suggesting that all nations have racial problems. If not exacerbating the U.S. image problem, this at least delayed addressing a critical issue during an important moment in US/Indian diplomacy.

Because the United States argued that American democracy was a model for the world (in the context of a Cold War battle for hearts and minds with the Soviets), the U.S. encountered global criticism for not living up to its own ideals. The more the U.S. emphasized the values of democracy – at the same time that there was global news coverage of American civil rights abuses – the more the U.S. was criticized as hypocritical, and the benefits American democracy were questioned. It took a very long time for American leaders to understand that they couldn’t talk about rights for other nations without protecting rights at home.

Important steps forward – Brown v. Board of Education, sending in the troops in Little Rock, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – along with careful management of the global story in U.S. public diplomacy, helped turn this around. By 1964, American diplomats could report that peoples in other nations had come to believe that the American government was on the side of civil rights, rather than being part of the problem. The unfortunate part of the story is that formal legal change, effectively marketed, could accomplish this. Continuing inequality, if below the radar of global news coverage, did not hold the world’s attention.

One obvious takeaway from this history is that a call for global human rights cannot be effective, and could be counter-productive, without meaningful progress toward human rights at home. There has been global coverage of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, reminiscent of the international interest in American civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. And there has been a devastating hearts and minds problem stemming from abuses at Abu Ghraib, revelations of U.S. torture, and the continuing scar of Guantanamo. If President Obama believes that promoting human rights is important to the fight against terrorism, this history shows that there is only one effective way to begin: by starting at home.

Cross-posted from Balkinization.

Eric Holder in American History

Attorney General Eric Holder's statement on Friday that the administration would likely file an Amicus Brief in the same-sex marriage cases is an example of why I told New York Magazine that Holder is a member of the cabinet likely to be regarded by historians as consequential 20 years from now. Holder said that the government "will urge the Supreme Court to make marriage equality a reality for all Americans.  It is time for our nation to take another critical step forward to ensure the fundamental equality of all Americans—no matter who they are, where they come from, or whom they love." When historians look back, the rapid progress on marriage equality will be a striking feature of the early 21st century, and Holder's actions will not be forgotten.

Development of the secret law of surveillance and targeted killing, and the prosecution of whistle-blowers, will not be forgotten either. In LGBTQ rights and security matters, it will be the enduring impact of legal change that will make Holder stand out as more consequential in the future than he may have seemed to be during the administration itself.

Among the 53 historians included in the piece on how historians will look back on the Obama Administration, Joyce Appleby and Charles Kesler agreed with me. Annette Gordon-Reed included Valerie Jarrett alongside Holder in importance. Crystal Feimster, Matthew Lassiter, and Robert Williams listed both Holder and Hillary Clinton. Many others pointed to Jarrett, Clinton or John Kerry. Others noted were: Timothy Geitner, John Brennan, Kathy Ruemmler, Nancy Pelosi, Susan Rice, Elizabeth Warren and Larry Summers. Lots of people included in the article skipped this question.

Cross-posted from Balkinization.

For Memorial Day: Toni Morrison's Home

On Memorial Day we are encouraged to remember those who have given their lives for the country through their military service.  Toni Morrison's new novel Home follows one soldier's homecoming.  It is a sobering mediation on the limits of our ability to understand.  My take appears today on the Oxford University Press blog.  I can't fully cross-post, but here's the beginning:

Toni Morrison’s new novel Home about a Korean War veteran’s struggles after the war might seem perfectly suited to an impending cultural turn. The close of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq and an anticipated draw-down of American troops in Afghanistan, might signal the end of a war era and a renewed focus on what we now call the homeland. Perhaps we can turn to Morrison’s beautiful and brief narrative to understand the journeys of our generation’s soldiers as they, like Frank Money (the protagonist), try to find their way home.

The message of this novel is sobering. Whatever home might be for Frank, it is not a place where war is absent, as he brings Korea along with him as he travels. If peace is thought of as an absence of war, it is a state that Morrison’s character is unable to experience. War memories, psychological injury, and loss have become a part of him, so that his wartime and peacetime selves have become one. His army jacket and dog tags are outward signs of an inner melding. Home for this soldier/citizen cannot be a place apart. And so a central theme in the novel is the kind of space home can be for a broken veteran like Frank.

 Continue reading here.

Phillips on Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from WWII to Iraq

An important new book on African Americans and the U.S. military, War! What Is It Good For?: Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq, by Kimberley Phillips, has just been released by the University of North Carolina Press.  It is in the UNC Press John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.  Going well beyond the desegregation story, the book illuminates the relationship between military service and African American culture.  Beautifully written, it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in race and war in U.S. history.

Here's the press book description:

African Americans' long campaign for "the right to fight" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom.

Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labor, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.

And an endorsement:

"Kimberley L. Phillips's superb book tells the long overdue story of the disproportionate impact of American wars on African Americans and their resistance to this unequal burden. Her expansive catalogue of black artistic engagement with wartime struggles for justice--from the Double V campaign to Baghdad Hip Hop--creates a new groove in the study of American protest culture. The book sounds off beautifully, voicing cries of freedom through the guns of war."--Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University, author of Afro-Orientalism and Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935-1946