Notes on White Supremacist IR Theory

Introduction

The article examines the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke to International Relations (IR) theory.
It uses Robert Vitalis' work on the 'Howard School' of IR as a starting point.
The article supports Vitalis' articulation of the Howard School's critique of white supremacist arguments in IR.
It challenges Vitalis’ disassociation of Du Bois and Locke from the formulation of IR theory, arguing they offered early theoretical arguments on national imperialism and cultural change.

White Supremacism and the Origins of International Relations

Racism is defined as the belief, practice, and policy of domination based on race, supported by institutional power, primarily state power. It's more than simple prejudice.
W.E.B. Du Bois stated that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line.
Early IR theorists grounded their work in Social Darwinist theses, assuming a hierarchy of races dominated by white Europeans.
This justified policies of white racial domination, including slavery, conquest, colonisation, and genocide.
Whites were assumed to possess civilisation, while non-whites were considered barbaric or savage.
The 'civilizing mission' and the concept of the 'white man’s burden' were imposed by force.
The field of IR provided an intellectual rationale for white supremacism.
Early works in IR focused on race as the main axis of inquiry, effectively making international relations 'interracial relations'.
Reinsch, considered a founding figure of IR, identified 'national imperialism' as states exploiting undeveloped regions and inferior races.
Reinsch's work suggests that the discipline of international relations had its beginnings in studies of imperialism, which were grounded in white supremacist assumptions.
Reinsch also supported anthropometric arguments about physiological differences between black and white brains, suggesting blacks' development could be facilitated under white tutelage.
Kerr argued that mankind is divided into a graduated scale from civilised to barbarian to savage, necessitating colonisation.
Giddings viewed governing inferior races as the duty of civilised races.
Du Bois had argued WWI was largely the result of disputes over imperial acquisitions, predating Lenin's work on imperialism.
Over time, justifications for white racism shifted from theology to biology and then anthropology.
Boas challenged anthropometric evidence linking cranial capacity and intelligence and rejected the notion of a cultural hierarchy, introducing cultural relativism.
Alain Locke accepted Boas' position on culture but argued that race was mainly sociological, not biological or anthropological.
Locke defined race as a social or national group sharing a common history, culture, and geographical region, calling it an 'ethnic fiction'.
Locke argued that culture produces racial character, rather than races creating culture.
Locke's contributions are largely ignored in contemporary scholarship on racism.
Previous studies analyse how white supremacism informs IR paradigms through conceptions of anarchy derived from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, who grounded their respective social contracts in a broader racial contract.
Anti-racist scholarship from Howard School scholars offered theoretical counterpoises to racist international relations.
The Howard School's contributions to IR theory are significant.

The Howard School of IR

Vitalis coined the term 'Howard School' to describe scholars associated with Howard University, influenced by Du Bois.
Key figures included Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate.
Vitalis acknowledges their commitment to understanding and writing about white world supremacy from the perspective of its victims.
The Howard School embraced a project of liberation against the theory and practice of white supremacy.
They critically examined the supposed truths of racial science and racism's role in sustaining imperialism.
Du Bois and the Howard School insisted that history, not biology, explained hierarchy.
They challenged the premise of international/interracial hierarchy.
A core concept was that racism served as a remarkably productive device for the imperialist.
The Howard School scholars focused on key issues of the incipient field of IR including race development, imperialism and decolonisation.
Decolonisation was a significant transformation of the 20th century.
Howard School scholars anticipated later scholarship ranging from the complex interdependence of Keohane and Nye to second image reversed analyses of Gourevitch.
Vitalis views his treatise as a way to further engagement across interdisciplinary divides in the humanities and social sciences.
He seeks to encourage intellectual insurgency by identifying weak points in the intellectual bulwark.
Vitalis dismisses as a diversion the question of how these ideas matter for theory, arguing that it matters more in the classroom, department, campus, and professional association.
Vitalis seems to disparage empirical theory despite acknowledging examples of Howard School scholars constructing IR theory.
Vitalis' opposition to theory is stark given his recognition of bringing black people into history and theory.
The Howard School informs IR theory beyond a critique of racism.
It is inaccurate to contend that they did not articulate IR theory reflecting their intellectual agency and acumen.
Howard School scholars proposed IR theory that was both novel and original. It goes beyond critique.
There is an analogy between their undertaking and Vitalis’ articulation of it is bell hooks’ engagement with feminist theory in which she implored feminists to advance beyond ‘victimization’, 'representation', to ‘agency’ - analogised to theory, which Vitalis dismisses.

Howard School Scholarship as IR Theory: Du Bois

Du Bois had a novel conception of the motivations and its implications for world politics.
Both white capital and labour were implicated in the oppression of non-whites in the colonies.
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois highlighted the revolutionary power of black labour in the US and its international implications.
Du Bois noted that it was ‘the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system, in the 19th century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power’.
For Du Bois, the US Civil War occasioned a ‘slave revolution’ associated with a ‘General Strike’ of hundreds of thousands of slaves that transformed a war to save the Union to a revolution to overthrow chattel slavery, fundamentally transforming the US, while also leading US national imperialists to cast their programme even farther abroad.
The black worker’s role in transforming the US for Du Bois, reflected the reality that ‘the black worker was the ultimate exploited’.
Black workers contended with ‘class enemies’ as well as ‘race enemies’; and among their ‘class-race’ enemies, the white proletariat was as significant as the white bourgeoisie.
Du Bois noted that following the Civil War: The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.
The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste. The colored world went down before England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and America. A new slavery arose. The upward moving of white labor was betrayed into wars for profit based on color caste. Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk.
It followed, for Du Bois, that the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded.
The racist fusion of white capital and labour in the aftermath of the Civil War through a type of internal application of ‘national imperialism’ within the US was prototypal of that which refashioned the landscape of world politics a half century later, giving rise to WWI.
Twenty years before publishing Black Reconstruction, Du Bois theorised the relationship among racism, national imperialism, and war – situating his discourse on black- white labour relations in the US within this context.
In ‘The African Roots of the War’, Du Bois argued that WWI was largely the result of disputes over imperial acquisitions.
Du Bois outlined the process that ‘gathered by starvation wages and boundless exploitation of one's weaker and poorer fellows at home, arise more magnificently the dreams of exploitation abroad’.
Du Bois continued that the present world war is the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital, whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations.
The fusion necessitated a concerted movement of the colonised people of the world and their diasporas to overthrow imperialism.
Thus, pan-Africanism, for example, was not only a plan for freedom, social justice, and prosperity, but global peace as well.
Du Bois’ thesis clearly implicates IR theory.
First, in recognising the prevalence of white supremacist imperialism which subjugated whole swaths of humanity in Africa and Asia, it recognises a global hierarchy as opposed to the global anarchy imagined and theorised by realists and liberal/idealist IR theorists.
Du Bois thesis of 1915 implicated social or cultural factors – specifically, racial factors – as determinants of imperialism and war.
Du Bois’ analysis of racism and imperialism in WWI dovetailed with that of Howard School scholar, Alain Locke, whose lecture of 1916, ‘The Political and Practical Conceptions of Race’, argued that modern conceptions of race largely reflect prevailing distributions of power.
Race prejudices falsley contribute to certain arbitrary ethnological and biological factors.

'Howard School' Scholarship as IR Theory: Locke

Locke argued that modern conceptions of race largely reflect prevailing distributions of power. He rejected the claim that white politico-military superiority reflected white cultural supremacy, arguing the reverse: white cultural supremacy was a result of white politico-military superiority.
For him, notions of racial supremacy ‘refer only to the political fortunes of a group and not to any intrinsic or inherent qualities with respect to social culture’.
in its political and practical aspects, race reflects political imperatives largely associated with imperialism. Viewing imperialism as fueled largely by commercial exploitation of foreign markets complemented by religious missionary activity, he noted that it enabled political, economic, and social domination internationally and domestically.
Locke noted that under modern conditions to be subjected to economic subordination and social prejudice is similar to being subject to political dominance and commercial exploitation.
That is, if one lives ‘within the system, you confront what is, after all, the internal or home policy of imperialism’.
Scholars say that Howard School scholars, Du Bois and Locke, in their analyses of race, imperialism, and war were not only critiquing white supremacist IR, they were proposing empirical theory on how world politics operated and not only how white racist scholars rationalised it.
They were also theorising international relations in novel, creative, and often prescient ways. Locke’s scholarship on culture and social change epitomises this.
Rejecting the view that culture was determined by race, in the first of his series of five lectures at Howard University in 1916 entitled, ‘The Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race’, he argued that race was sociological. For Locke, ‘when the modern man talks about race[,] he is not talking about the anthropological or biological idea at all’ but the relative fortunes of ‘an ethnic group’; however, Locke contends, ‘these groups, from the point of view of anthropology, are ethnic fictions’.
For Locke, to the extent that a person has a race he has inherited either a favorable or an unfavorable social heredity.
Locke was among the first scholars to explain that race is a social construct.
In the lecture, ‘Modern Race Creeds and Their Fallacies’, Locke argued that peoples of different races, including whites and blacks in the US, were highly assimilative beings within a broader society whose arbitrary policies and practices were based on the physical incompatibility of racial types;
American society is hastening the process of social assimilation by the very restrictive measures that it is imposing.Social cultures are highly interdependent; and he emphasised that ‘[t]here is no part of the universe today which is not in some way, economic[,] or political[,] or social, bound up with the other parts[;]’ such that ‘no social culture in the present day world will be ignorant of other types or object to [some kind of]contact with other types’; and this relationship obtains ‘no matter how much a line is drawn theoretically between races’ because ‘the practical demands of present day life necessitate the contact of races, and an increasing contact of races’.
Locke’s thesis insists that race consciousness, it must only be a 'secondary type'.
Given its functionality especially for minority groups seeking a basis for cultural identity, belonging and solidarity, social race should be ‘conserved’ through the promotion of secondary race consciousness.
Locke is clear that this is not a doctrine of race isolation but It is really a theory of social conservation which in practice conserves the best in each group, and promotes the development of social solidarity out of heterogeneous elements.
He saw this as ‘the race concept of the future’.
The motor of this process of culture groups – transposition and transvaluation of culture within them, and reciprocity and tolerance between them – is facilitated by democracy more than any other political system; thus, his framework implies a relationship between culture and democracy. Democracy, for Locke, facilitates culture’s realisation of its cosmopolitanism, although he viewed racial democracy as a political system that no state had achieved.
Although Locke’s thesis clearly has implications for domestic politics, importantly, given the focus of this essay, it has implications for IR theory, as well; among the most prominent is the role of culture based diasporas in the global system.
In this way, Locke’s thesis suggests the relevance of diasporas as actors in world politics and, thus, objects of study in IR. This is not a deduction relying on racist notions of ‘civilizationism’, which Locke debunked in his Howard lectures, nor does it rely on primordialist renderings of ‘clashing civilizations’ prevalent in IR today. Instead, Locke’s arguments on race, culture and political change were prescient, novel theoretical expositions of the motive forces of world politics when promulgated at Howard in 1916.
In fact, Locke’s – and Dubois’ – theses not only constitute IR theory, but anticipate a ‘diasporist’ paradigm of IR.

Conclusion

In this article, the author has examined the contributions to IR theory of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke – two scholars of what Vitalis refers to as the Howard School of IR.
In delineating only a few of their many scholarly contributions, the author has both embraced and challenged Vitalis’ thesis on the importance of their work. Embracing Vitalis’ invaluable articulation of the Howard School’s critique of white supremacism in IR, the author has also challenged his apparent disassociation of these scholars from the formulation of IR theory itself.
The author outlined some of Du Bois’ and Locke’s theoretical arguments on the role of ‘national imperialism’ in modern war, as well as theses of cultural change and its impact on international relations, which not only articulate IR theory but anticipate a ‘diasporist’ paradigm of IR.
It is only that aspect of Vitalis’ otherwise exceptional work that dismisses or minimises their formulation of IR theory with which the author takes issue.
The author insists on acknowledging that among those who actually blazed the trails of emancipatory discourse with respect to race – such as the Howard School theorists, whose insights, struggle and sacrifice have enabled their descendants, were black men and women who proposed strategies to transform oppressive societies throughout the world,One of the instruments they devised and utilised to accomplish these was IR theory; and a fair share of it remains pertinent today.