race matters essay

Race Matters by Cornel West: A Book Review Essay

In Race Matters , Cornel West devotes an entire chapter to criticizing and justifying affirmative action. On the one hand, he claims that this policy is aimed at middle-class African Americans and harms other minority strata. On the other hand, West still justifies politics because he believes that “without affirmative action, racial and sexual discrimination would return with a vengeance” (West, 1993, p. 64). He believes that America tends to redistribute wealth on a racial basis due to the historical past. I think that West’s argument is vulnerable to criticism, as it can be refuted both factually and logically.

The rise of racist and sexist tendencies due to the lack of affirmative action is doubtful because it is not the only element in the fight against racial and sexual prejudice. I would argue that the liberalization trend is strong and prominent around the country and that the policy’s absence would not reverse it. For example, the affirmative action ban in universities such as Texas A&M, UW, University of Florida, did not decrease the number of Black and Hispanic students (Affirmative action, n.d.). In addition, West’s prediction of the return of racism is based solely on reference to the country’s past and historical experience. However, predicting the future requires a more variable factual justification since historical experience in its pure form cannot be used as a predictive tool.

West could reply that my arguments are valid only if we assume that the American social system has been restructured entirely and racism and sexism are wholly excluded from it. However, West is of the opinion that fascism, racism, and sexism are ingrained in human nature and cannot be exterminated (Miah, 2022). These beliefs can only be controlled by individuals and sets of politics that smooth out inequalities by redistributing resources.

Miah, M. (2022). Cornel West’s Race Matters . Against the Current . Web.

West, C. (1993). Race Matters . Beacon Press.

Affirmative action . (n.d.). Ballotpedia. Web.

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Race Matters

By Dr. Cornel West

Racial Justice & Human Dignity

The fundamental litmus test for American democracy-its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture-remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the problem of the color line. –from the new Preface

First published in 1993 on the one-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, Race Matters was a national best-seller, and it has since become a groundbreaking classic on race in America.

Race Matters contains West’s most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and compassionate. Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans, as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.

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Look Inside

Race Matters, 25th Anniversary

With a New Introduction

By Cornel West

Category: philosophy.

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About Race Matters, 25th Anniversary

The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking classic, with a new introduction First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West’s most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X. The insights Dr. West brings to these complex problems remain relevant, provocative, creative, and compassionate. In a new introduction for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Dr. West argues that we are in the midst of a spiritual blackout characterized by imperial decline, racial animosity, and unchecked brutality and terror as seen in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlottesville. Calling for a moral and spiritual awakening, Dr. West finds hope in the collective and visionary resistance exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Rock, and the Black freedom tradition. Now more than ever, Race Matters is an essential book for all Americans, helping us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.

Also by Cornel West

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“As moving as any of the sermons of the Rev. Martin Luther King, as profound as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk , as exhilarating in their offering of liberation as James Baldwin’s early essays.” —David Nicholson, Washington Post Book World “Cornel West is one of the most authentic, brilliant, prophetic, and healing voices in America today. We ignore his truth in Race Matters at our personal and national peril.” —Marian Wright Edelman “Exciting . . . illuminating . . . West’s thinking consistently challenges the conventional wisdom [and] confronts the reader with profound and unsettling insights.” —Robert S. Boynton, Newsday “A compelling blend of philosophy, sociology and political commentary . . . It directly takes on some of the most volatile issues facing American society today. . . . One can only applaud the ferocious moral vision and astute intellect on display in these pages.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

In This Section

• Complete Collection

In the wake of violence against Black Americans and in a moment of national reckoning in Summer 2020, the HKS Library pulled together a reading list that is inspired and largely informed by Resources and Reading on Racial Justice, Racial Equity, and Anti-Racism published by the Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project (IARA) at the Ash Center and in partnership with the HKS Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging . 

This reading list is a starting place to find resources that speak to racial justice, racial equity, and anti-racism.  If you have suggestions or feedback, please send us an email: [email protected] . Books are linked to e-book versions where available.

In addition to access through Harvard Library, we believe these titles should be a part of other academic and public libraries. If these titles are not a part of your local libraries, most libraries solicit and support community requests. If you have questions about how to request a title for inclusion in your local library collection, please feel free to reach out to our staff ( [email protected] ) and we are happy to provide guidance.

The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow  has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by  Michelle Alexander’ s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” As the  Birmingham News  proclaimed, it is “undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S.”

Citation:  Alexander, Michelle.  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . New York: The New Press, 2020.

• Read e-book @ Harvard Library
• View @ Publisher Site

One Person, No Vote

Carol Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

Citation:  Anderson, Carol.  One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy . New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Carefully linking historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Carol Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage.

Citation:  Anderson, Carol.  White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide . New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

The Fire Next Time

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin ’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both Black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

Citation:  Baldwin, James.  The Fire Next Time . New York: Vintage, 1992.

• Read e-book @ Harvard Library

White Fragility

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration,  Robin DiAngelo  examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Citation:  DiAngelo, Robin.  White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism . Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.

Never Caught

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Erica Armstrong Dunbar tells the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked it all to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom.

Citation:  Dunbar, Erica Armstrong.  Never Caught: The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge . 37Ink; Atria Books: New York, 2017.

• View @ Author Site

How to Be Less Stupid About Race

Crystal Fleming  provides your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics.

Citation:  Fleming, Crystal.  How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide . New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.

The Broken Heart of America

From Lewis and Clark’s 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation’s past.

Citation:  Johnson, Walter.  The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.  New York: Basic Books, 2020.

How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi 's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America - but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. 

Citation:  Kendi, Ibram X.  How to Be an Antiracist . New York: One World, 2019.

Kiese Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed Black son to a complicated and brilliant Black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

Citation:  Laymon, Kiese.  Heavy: An American Memoir . New York: Scribner, 2018.

The Condemnation of Blackness

The idea of Black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of Black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants,  Khalil Gibran Muhammad  - HKS Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy - reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Citation:  Muhammad, Khalil Gibran.  The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

The Color of Law

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein , a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through  de facto  segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather,  The Color of Law  incontrovertibly makes clear that it was  de jure  segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Citation:  Rothstein, Richard.  The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America . New York; London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.

• View @ Harvard Library

Courageous Conversations About Race

Glenn Singleton  explains the need for candid, courageous conversations about race so that educators may understand why student disengagement and achievement inequality persists and learn how they can develop a curriculum that promotes true educational equity and excellence.

Citation:  Singleton, Glenn.  Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools . Los Angeles: Corwin, 2015.

This book is  Bryan Stevenson 's (MPP/JD 1985 LLD 2015) unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice. Stevenson was honored by HKS in 2018 with the 2018 Alumni Public Service Award .

Citation:  Stevenson, Bryan.  Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.  New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

• View young adult adaptation @ Publisher Site

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, white, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy?  Beverly Daniel Tatum , a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides.

Citation:  Tatum, Beverly Daniel.  Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations about Race . New York: Basic Books, 2003.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor  surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

Citation:  Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta.  From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

• R ead e-book @ Harvard Library

Race Matters

Race Matters  contains Cornel West ’s most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and compassionate.

Citation:  West, Cornel.  Race Matters . Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Citation: Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . New York: Random House, 2020.

Charleston Syllabus

In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, Professors  Chad Williams ,  Kidada E. Williams , and  Keisha N. Blain  sought a way to put the murder-and the subsequent debates in the media-in the context of America's tumultuous history of race relations and racial violence on a global scale. They created the  Charleston Syllabus  on June 19, starting it as a hashtag on Twitter linking to scholarly works on the myriad of issues related to the murder.

Citation:  Williams, Chad, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain. (Eds.)  Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence . Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence

If you believe that talking about race is impolite, or that "colorblindness" is the preferred approach, you must read this book.  Derald Wing Sue  debunks the most pervasive myths using evidence, easy-to-understand examples, and practical tools.

Citation:  Wing Sue, Derald.  Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015.

The Sum of Us

The Sum of Us is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and self-destructing, materially rich but spiritually starved and vastly unequal. Heather McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to tell an irrefutable story of racism's costs, but at the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy's collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.

Citation: McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together . New York: One World, 2021.

• Hannah-Jones, Nikole. (2019). The 1619 Project .  The New York Times Magazine .
• Coates, Ta-Nehisi. (2014). The Case for Reparations .  The Atlantic .
• DiAngelo, Robin. (2017). Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism .  Huffington Post .
• McIntosh, Peggy. (1989). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack . Peace and Freedom .
• Serwer, Adam. (2020). The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying .  The Atlantic .
• Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem. (2020). Don’t Understand the Protests? What You're Seeing is People Pushed to the Edge .  Los Angeles Times .
• Hinton, Elizabeth. (2020). The Minneapolis Uprising in Context .  Boston Review .
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 1619 .  The New York Times .
• Muhammad, Khalil Gibran and Ben Austen. Some of My Best Friends Are . Pushkin .
• Carroll, Rebecca. Come Through with Rebecca Carroll .  WNYC Studios .
• Biewen, John. Seeing White .  Scene On Radio .
• Raghuveera, Nikhil and Erica Licht. Untying Knots .  SoundCloud .
• Moyo, Thoko. A historic crossroads for systemic racism and policing in America .  PolicyCast . Featuring Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Erica Chenoweth .

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An Ash Center project working at the intersection of community, academia, and policy to address questions of anti-racism policy, practice, and institutional change.

Maya Sen & Matthew Blackwell's "Deep Roots"

In this  Behind the Book  video, professors take an historical look at how the institution of U.S. slavery continues to shape the views of the present.

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HKS faculty tackle policy questions from racial equity, to the climate, to education, and beyond.

Justice Matters Podcast

Carr Center director Sushma Raman investigates a wide array of human rights issues at home and abroad.

Anti-Racism Book & Film Club

Harvard Library facilitates community discussions of anti-Black racism through books & film.

Race Matters by Cornel West

Several events serve as references in the book such as the 1992 Los Angeles unrest, the 1991 Senate-approved trials of a high Court Justice Thomas, the 1991 riots instigated by racial discrimination in Crown Heights all look like long-gone memories from a past era. This book was printed from the perspective of the end of the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, and also the starting of the Clinton Administration.

Several western nations used the happenings which surround the L.A. Riots as an opening for his clarification of some social trends, which by chapter contained the risk of nihilism in the colored community, the increasing vacuum of well-built black leadership, the political molests against affirmative action and the fight of the special connection between the Jewish communities and African-American.

The west thinking on the risk of nihilism in the black society during the early 1990s and late 1980s, just about the climax of the crack-cocaine drug wave, where in particular interesting. “The strongest rival of black existence in America has been and is neither tyranny nor exploitation but relatively the nihilistic risk – that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning.”

Largely west contributed the increase in nihilism in the society to the vicious unleashing of market services during the deregulatory climate in the 1980s. African-Americans have for many years been living in the US wilderness looking for a promised land. But most of the black folks now dwell in a jungle controlled by cutthroat market morality devoid of any self-belief in liberation or hope for freedom.” He recognized the decrease influence of black organizations and leadership, which has repeatedly nurtured individuals in the society, as an extra major factor for the increase of this threat.

Afterward in the book, west concentrate on what he expressed as a “crisis” in black leadership. The author argues that a great number of the current political leaders in the community are not perfect to being race-effacing managers, for instance, mainstream business organizers, politicians, race-identity protestors, and grassroots protest leaders. He insists that both styles are arrogant, with mainstreamers openly seizing for monetary benefit and demonstrators confining themselves to being Kingfishes within a black turf.

When the book was published, West was harshly pessimistic over the ability of the contemporary rise of leaders to concurrently demonstrate these positive qualities, and inspire the Black societies. “Current generation must also fabricate such a figure. We don’t have an Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. or a Ronald Dellums. The said vacuums are like a putrid sore at the core of black leadership and the dilemma of the underprivileged in the US and abroad worsens.

It is shocking that in the west only touch to the late Chicago mayor, Washington, and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Presidential Campaign as the examples of race-transcending, prophetic leadership. Certainly, West’s remarks about Jackson’s declining leadership post within the black community were particularly prophetic, about the personal experiences Jackson has had over the past year. “Jackson’s television style refuse to accept grass-roots organizing and, most vital, democratic responsibility. Due to his energy, brilliance and charismatic heart maintained his public visibility – but at the cost of programmatic follow-through. We are coming to the moment in which this style tires its progressive ability.”

Given Jesse Jackson’s recent efforts to aid out West and other Black-American Studies professors’ attempts to force an apology from Lawrence Summers the president of the Harvard University for the lack of convicting proclamations supporting affirmative action, it would be exciting to get a more recent appraisal of Jackson’s leadership abilities.

He used to believe in the upcoming of black conservatives in the mainstream media, West points that as he disagrees with most of their premises, these media-formed voices could cause “a more ethical and passionate political discourse” within the colored community. “Having small valuable imminent of the upcoming black conservatives can be included into a broader progressive view that utterly disapproves their unwarranted conclusions and repugnant strategies.”

The European countries call for even bigger public support for affirmative action efforts, advocate aggressive work within the black society to “surpass” anti-Semitic and intolerant impulses, and urges wide honesty within the community to meet stereotypes relating to black sexuality and aesthetics. The author shows foresight while attempting to tackle the enduring obsessed younger African-American with the figure of Malcolm X in the 1990s and late 1980s.

Though, West is unable to fully hit home in his findings concerning the renewal of Malcolm X’s image. While Malcolm X’s charisma, the sweltering impact of his changes, and the timeliness of his political posture all partially explain his re-emergence, West does not recognize the black leadership void as a convincing factor. The Re-celebration of Malcolm X was mainly due to the strongest testament of the lack of inspiring leadership in the society, and the importance of upcoming blacks to fill the void with the strength of a powerful God-created man who was killed a quarter-century.

Following the happenings in the early 1990s, the march which was also known as the Million Man March led to; the decrease in crime and violence within the African-American societies, the growth in the economy of the late 1990s, the contentious Presidential Election for the 2000 and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Race’s book also effectively exemplifies the modern ways that continue to affect the Black-American community.

Cornel West. Race Matters Sn, Michigan 1993.

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Why race still matters

Ian Hacking, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1991, holds the chair of Philosophy and History of Scienti½c Concepts at the Collège de France. His work spans the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language, the theory of probability and statistical inference, and the socio-historical examination of the rise and fall of disciplines and theories. His most recent books are “Mad Travellers” (1998), “The Social Construction of What” (1999), and “Historical Ontology” (2004).

Why has race mattered in so many times and places? Why does it still matter? Put more precisely, why has there been such a pervasive tendency to apply the category of race and to regard people of different races as essentially different kinds of people? Call this the ‘first question.’ Of course there are many more questions that one must also ask: Why has racial oppression been so ubiquitous? Why racial exploitation? Why racial slavery? Perhaps we tend to think of races as essentially different just because we want to excuse or to justify the domination of one race by another.

I shall proceed with the first question by canvassing five possible answers to it that variously invoke nature , genealogy (in the sense of Michel Foucault), cognitive science , empire , and pollution rules .

One final preliminary remark is in order. Most parts of this essay could have been written last year or next year, but the discussion of naturalism, medicine, and race could only have been written in November of 2004, and may well be out of date by the time this piece is printed.

Why has the category of race been so pervasive? One answer says that the distinction is just there, in the world for all to see. Superficial differences between races do exist in nature, and these are readily recognized.

The naturalist agrees at once that the distinctions are less in the nature of things than they once were, thanks to interbreeding among people whose ancestors have come from geographically distinct blocks. Racial distinctions are particularly blurred where one population has been translated by force to live in the midst of another population and yet has not been assimilated–slaves taken from West Africa and planted in the Southern United States, for example. The naturalist notes that traditional racial distinctions are less and less viable the more children are born to parents whose geographical origins are very different.

Sensible naturalists stop there. The belief that racial differences are anything more than superficial is a repugnant error. John Stuart Mill was the wisest spokesman for this position.

Here, in modern terminology, is his doctrine: (1) Nature makes differences between individuals. These differences are real, not constructed. (2) We classify things according to differences we observe. Classifications are made by people and encoded in social practices, institutions, and language. (3) Some classes are such that their members have little in common except the marks by which we sort them into those classes–call those superficial kinds. (4) Other classes have members with a great many things in common that do not follow from the marks by which we sort them into classes. These are “real Kinds.” 1

Examples? “White things,” he wrote, referring not to race but to the color itself, “are not distinguished by any common properties except whiteness; or if they are, it is only by such as are in some way dependent on, or connected with, whiteness.” But horses, to use one of his other examples, have endless properties in common, over and above whatever marks we use to distinguish them from other animals or other kinds of things. Horses form a real Kind, but the class of white things is a superficial kind.

The contemporary philosophical concept of a ‘natural kind’ is a descendent of Mill’s notion. Nonphilosophers who have come across this phrase may suppose it refers to a well worked out, technical, and stable concept. I argue elsewhere that it does not. 2

Mill himself was as notable a profeminist and antiracist as can be claimed for a white nineteenth-century man. Although he argued that real Kinds exist, he at once went on to ask whether the races and sexes are real Kinds, or if they are merely superficial, like the classifications “Christian, Jew, Musselman, and Pagan.” The religious confessions are not real Kinds, he argued, because there is no property that Christians have and Muslims lack, or vice versa, except whatever follows from their faiths.

What about race? Most anthropologists of Mill’s day held that there were five races, named geographically but recognized by color: Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American, and Malayan. According to Mill, color and certain other physiological traits are the marks by which we distinguish members of the different races. Races would be real Kinds if there were endlessly many other differences between the races that did not follow from the marks by which we distinguish them. Are there endlessly many such differences?

Well, you cannot rule that out a priori, Mill thought. “The various races and temperaments, the two sexes, and even the various ages, may be differences of Kind, within our meaning of the term. I say they may be; I do not say they are.” Mill believed that only empirical science could determine whether the various races, as distinguished by color and a few other features, pick out classes that are distinct in a great many unrelated ways. “If their differences can all be traced to climate and habits [or, he added in later editions, to some one or a few special differences in structure], they are not, in the logician’s view, specifically distinct.” He would have been pleased by Anthony Appiah’s careful discussion of very much the same question using more recent terminology. Science might have revealed an endless number of differences between the races that are not consequences of the marks by which we distinguish them, namely color and physiognomy. But science has not done so, and almost certainly will not. Mill, like Appiah, thus concludes that the races are not real Kinds.

This conclusion, however, does not answer, or aim at answering, the specific question I raised at the outset, of why there is such a pervasive tendency to apply the category of race. Maybe Mill thought the answer was obvious. The desire of one racial group to dominate, exploit, or enslave another demands legitimacy in societies that, like modern Europe and America, are committed to versions of egalitarianism. Race sciences were devised to discover a lot of differences between races that do not follow from the marks of color and structure by which we distinguish them. You do not have to treat people equally, if they are sufficiently different.

Although it takes us some distance from the ‘first question,’ some recent events force us to clarify the naturalist position on race. In an important editorial on the U.S. census published in the year 2000, Nature Genetics stated: “That race in this context is not a scientific term is generally acknowledged by scientists–and a message that cannot be repeated enough.” An editorial in 2001 observed that “scientists have long been saying that at the genetic level there is more variation between two individuals in the same population than between populations, and that there is no biological basis for ‘race.’” 3 Now–in November of 2004–this selfsame journal has produced a special supplement on the medical and genetic uses of racial and ethnic classification. And the November 11 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine highlights the news of the ‘race-based’ drug targeted at African Americans suffering from certain types of heart failure. All this is breaking news. Hence what follows cannot be definitive, but one may hope that a perspective somewhat distanced from media discussion can be useful even in the midst of it.

We must first update Mill with a little logic. When he wrote about differences between classes, he had in mind properties that serve to distinguish members of one class from another in a uniform way. A uniform difference between cows and horses is something that is true in the main of any cow but not true in the main of any horse–digestion by rumination, for example. There are ever so many such differences between horses and cows; hence they are real Kinds. Call them uniform differences . There are a great many uniform differences that distinguish horses from other kinds of animals, but almost no uniform differences that distinguish white things from green things, except their color, or Muslims from Christians, except their faith.

Writing in 1843, Mill had little occasion to think about statistical differences, which were only just beginning to loom large on the scientific horizon. We need some new concepts: I will use the words ‘significant,’ ‘meaningful,’ and ‘useful.’ All three go with the dread word ‘statistical.’ Since we are among other things talking about so-called races, namely, geographically and historically identified groups of people, we are talking about populations. And we are talking about some characteristic or property of some but not all members of a population.

‘Significance’ was preempted by statistics early in the twentieth century. It is completely entrenched there. Here I use it for any major difference detected by a well-understood statistical analysis. A characteristic is statistically significant if its distribution in one population is significantly different from that in a comparable population. Let us say that a characteristic is statistically meaningful if there is some understanding, in terms of causes, of why the difference is significant. For example, in the early days no one knew why smoking was associated with lung cancer, but now we understand that quite well, although not completely. The correlation used to be merely significant, but now it is meaningful.

Finally, a characteristic is statistically useful if it can be used as an indicator of something of interest in some fairly immediate practical concern. Take an example from another topic nowadays much discussed. A body mass index (BMI) over 31 is a statistically useful indicator of the risk of type 2 diabetes, and is therefore useful in epidemiology and preventive medicine. (There are much better indicators involving the distribution of mass and muscle in the body, but at present such indicators are expensive to measure, while BMI measurement costs almost nothing.)

Classes that are statistically significant, meaningful, or useful are not thereby real Kinds. There is no reason to believe that there are a great many independent and uniform differences that distinguish obese persons from those whose BMI is in the recommended range of 18 to 25.

‘Significant’ in the end relies on technical notions in applied probability theory. ‘Meaningful’ has no resort to viable technical notions in any discipline (all claims to the contrary are spurious). There do exist clear, although often abused, criteria of statistical significance. There are no clear criteria for being statistically meaningful. In practice the distinction is often easily made. For a long time, the class of people who smoke was known only to be statistically significant with respect to lung cancer. One had no idea of the causal mechanisms underlying the correlation. Now we think we understand the connections between nicotine and death, although these connections are still merely probable. We cannot say of a young man beginning to smoke that if he continues with his vice he will succumb to lung cancer if nothing else gets him first. But we can say that many such young men will die of lung cancer, and oncologists know enough to be able to explain why.

Unlike statistical significance, the idea of being statistically meaningful is a hand-waving concept that points at the idea of an explanation or a cause. Imprecise hand-waving concepts are dangerous when they are given fancy names. They can be put to wholly evil ends. But if we do not give them phony names and are well aware of their imperfections, they can be useful when we need them.

We do need this concept. Many people–as evidenced by debates going on at the time of this writing, in November of 2004–are scared of the idea that the traditional list of races employed by traditional racists might be statistically significant classes. With good reason!

Ten years ago The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray attracted a great deal of attention. The authors claimed that the Gaussian distributions of IQ scores establish a natural distinction of some importance between different races. They forcefully argued that the class of African Americans is a statistically significant class–significant with respect to a property they called intelligence, and which they measured with IQ tests. They did not imply that the races are real Kinds. That is, they did not state that there is a host of uniform differences between Caucasian Americans and African Americans. Readers not unreasonably assumed, however, that the authors meant exactly that. At any rate, the authors clearly were not talking about mere correlations, namely, disparities between IQ scores within different racial groups. But they did not establish that these disparities are statistically meaningful to any biological understanding.

About the same time that The Bell Curve was published, ogre naturalists, such as Philippe Rushton in Race, Evolution, and Behavior , made more sweeping claims to biologically grounded racial differences. They claimed that the races are distinguished by many properties rightly prized or feared for different strengths and weaknesses. If that were true, then races would exactly fit Mill’s definition of a real Kind.

One deplores both Rushton and The Bell Curve , but there is an absolutely fundamental logical difference between what the two assert. Rushton claimed that the races are real Kinds. One imagines that Herrnstein and Murray thought so too, but what they claimed was that the races are statistically significant classes. And they implied that this is statistically meaningful. Despite the fact that his doctrines have a centuries-old pedigree, we can dismiss the egregious Rushton. We can also refute Murray and Herrnstein. 4 Mill’s type of naturalism has contempt for both doctrines. Loathing of these quite recent doctrines and their predecessors has, not surprisingly, produced revulsion against any sort of naturalism about race. Today there is some consternation over the appearance of what is called race-based medicine.

The science of medicine was for quite a long time the science of the European male body, with footnotes for non-European or female bodies. All that has changed: those footnotes are now chapters. But the current situations for the groups that had been relegated to the footnotes are quite different. Many medical differences between males and females are uniform, but medical differences between races are almost always only statistical.

We have long known that some ailments are restricted to some gene pools. Tay-Sachs is a hereditary disease (in which an enzyme deficiency leads to the accumulation of certain harmful residues in the brain and nerve tissue, often resulting in mental retardation, convulsions, blindness, and, ultimately, death) that almost exclusively affects young children of eastern European Jewish descent. ‘Ashkenazi’ is a valuable geographical, historical, and social classification. It is geographical because it indicates where members of this class, or their near ancestors, came from, namely, eastern Europe. It makes a contrast with Sephardic Jews, whose roots are in Spain. In modern Europe and North America, social differences between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic hardly matter to most people, but they remain significant in North Africa and West Asia. Until further interbreeding makes it totally obsolete, Ashkenazi is a statistically significant and a statistically meaningful class with respect to Tay-Sachs disease.

There are similar geographical-historical indicators for lactose intolerance and for an inability to digest fava beans. West African ancestry is an indicator for being a carrier of the sickle-cell anemia trait, which confers some immunity against malaria. This trait was often stigmatized as simply ‘black.’ In fact, it is primarily West African, although it shows up in Mediterranean populations where malaria was a major selector for survival. The indicator was abused for racial reasons in widespread screening.

“Drug approved for Heart Failure in African Americans”–headline on the first business page of The New York Times , July 20, 2004. Here we go again? Quite possibly. “The peculiar history [of this drug] on the road to the market presents a wide array of troubling and important issues concerning the future status of race as a category for constructing and understanding health disparities in American society.” 5 For a stark reminder of the commerce, the Times reported that the previous day the stock of the drug’s maker, NitroMed, rose from $4.31 to $10.21, and had reached $16 at midday. This story has been ongoing for a decade in medical, commercial, and regulatory circles.

There are real problems about the racially targeted heart drug. BiDil is a mixture of two well-known heart medications. Scientific papers assert, first, that other medicines are not as good for African Americans with heart failure as they are for other Americans with this problem, and, second, that BiDil works better for African Americans with certain specifics than any other drug on the market. 6 In fact, randomized trials were discontinued because the drug was manifestly effective on black patients. Nobody well understands why. The reasons could be at least in part social and economic (including dietary) rather than hereditary. The correlation is strongly significant, but it is not statistically meaningful at present from a genetic or other biological point of view.

Even if one is a complete skeptic about, for example, a genetic basis for the differential efficacy of the drug, the drug does appear to be statistically useful in treating the designated class of patients. That means that race may be a useful indicator to a physician of the potential effectiveness of this rather than another drug–under present social and historical conditions.

Now turn to leukemia. Bone marrow transplants help an important class of patients. Donors and recipients must have matching human leukocyte antigens (HLAs); at present, doctors try to match six different types of them. If a patient has no relative to serve as a donor, matches are hard to come by. The relevant antigens are unevenly distributed among ethnic and racial groups. 7 There exist registries of possible donors –truly generous persons, for at present donation of bone marrow is quite harrowing. Happily, free-floating stem cells in the blood also help, but the donor must take a lot of drugs to boost those stem cells. Another source of cells is umbilical cord blood. But this, like all the other options, requires antigen matching.

In the United States, the National Bone Marrow Program maintains the master registry. Most people in existing registries have tended to be middle-aged and white, which means that whites have a good chance of finding a match. Hence there have been racially targeted programs for Asian and African Americans. In the United States and Canada there is also the Aboriginal Bone Marrow Registries Association, and in the United Kingdom there is the African Caribbean Leukemia Trust. Asians for Miracle Marrow Matches has been very successful, especially in the Los Angeles region. The African Americans Uniting for Life campaign has been less successful, for all sorts of historical reasons. An African American with leukemia has a far worse chance of finding a match in time than members of other populations have. That is a social fact, but there is also a biological fact: there is far greater heterogeneity in the human leukemia antigen in persons of African origins than in other populations. 8 (This fact fits well with the hypothesis that all races are descendants of only one of many African populations that existed at the time that human emigration began out of Africa–populations whose characteristics have continued to be distributed among Africans today.)

If you go to the websites for the organizations that maintain the registries, you will see they do not shilly-shally in some dance of euphemistic political correctness about race. For them it is a matter of life and death. Without the Asian registries there would have been many more dead Asian Americans in the past decade. For lack of more African Americans on the registries there will be more dead African Americans in the next few years than there need be.

We certainly lack a complete understanding of the distribution of human leukemia antigens in different geographically identified populations. But we do have some biological understanding of the underlying causal differences. And race is a very useful quick indicator of where to look for matches, just as the BMI is a useful quick indicator of potential health problems.

So when, if ever, is it useful to speak in terms of the category of race, on the grounds that the races in some contexts are not only statistically significant but also statistically useful classes? To answer this question, we can use our distinctions:

• The Bell Curve may show that IQ is a statistically significant characteristic of some American subpopulations, but it is neither meaningful from a biological point of view nor useful for any well-defined purpose.
• Some medications may be less effective, and BiDil may be more effective, for African Americans with certain types of heart failure. If so, this is statistically significant and statistically useful for helping patients, but (in my opinion) it is at present not statistically meaningful.
• The relationships between human leukemia antigens and race are statistically significant, statistically meaningful for a biological understanding, and statistically useful in making marrow matches possible for minority groups.

It is not a good idea, in my opinion, to speak of BiDil as a race-based medicine, as do The New York Times and other media. The drug is not in the least based on race. It is quite possible that the reason it is more useful for African Americans than for other large and loosely characterized groups has less to do with the inherent constitution of their cardiovascular systems than with a mixture of social factors. If we had reliable data on the relevance of diets shared by a subclass of white and black Americans, we might be able to help whites with similar diets. The drug would not then be ‘diet-based’ but ‘diet-targeted.’ If you find it useful to use the word ‘race,’ say ‘race-targeted’ medicine.

I should have thought that the differential distribution of human leukocyte antigens would be esoteric enough to escape notice. Not so. The Stormfront White Nationalist Community, whose best-known figure is the neo-Nazi David Duke, is having a good time on one branch of its website discussing HLA diversity. In my opinion, the correct strategy is not to play down the differential distribution of HLA, but to make it common knowledge that specific differences among peoples may be used in helping them–in much the same way that white Australians, given their socially induced tendency to overexpose themselves to the sun, should be targeted to cut down on the rate of death due to skin cancer.

I have introduced these remarks to make plain that naturalism about race, far from being an atavistic throwback to an era well left behind, is a topic for today, one about which we have to become clearer. Not because the races are real Kinds, denoting essentially different kinds of people. But because already we know that the races are not only statistically significant classes for some diseases, but also statistically useful. Some correlations are statistically meaningful. There is every reason to believe that more statistically meaningful correlations will be discovered.

Every time such a phenomenon is found useful, the racists will try to exploit the racial difference: witness the neo-Nazi use of differential antigens. Hence we need to be fully aware of what is involved.

A historian may well despise the complacency of naturalism. Differences between the races have seemed inevitable in the West, it will be argued, because of a framework of thought whose origins can be unmasked only by a genealogy. Classification and judgment are seldom separable. Racial classification is evaluation. Strong ascriptions of comparative merit were built into European racial classification and into evaluations of human beauty from the beginning. And so the Caucasian face and form were deemed closest to perfect beauty.

That is the vein in which Cornel West has sketched a genealogy of modern racism. 9 Though his is not exactly a deep genealogy in the spirit of Nietzsche and Foucault, it is an excellent résumé of events. I wish only to comment on his starting point, less to correct it than to encourage rethinking the connection between race and geography.

.  .  .

• 1 His own words are old-fashioned but lovely. The differences between members of classes “are made by nature . . . while the recognition of those differences as grounds for classification and of naming is . . . the act of man.” However, “we find a very remarkable diversity . . . between some classes and others.” Only superficial resemblances link members of one type of class, while members of classes of the other type have a vast number (he said an endless number) of properties they share. Those that share an almost endless number of properties are his real Kinds. From John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive , first published in 1843. The discussion of racial classification is found in bk. 1, chap. 7, sec. 4. The changes Mill made in later editions of the book involved sex, not race–doubtless because Mill hoped to get the questions about sex exactly right for Harriett Taylor. See chap. 7, on Millon classification, in my forthcoming book, The Tradition of Natural Kinds (Cambridge University Press).
• 2 This is one of the conclusions urged in my book The Tradition of Natural Kinds .
• 3 “Census, Race and Science,” Nature Genetics 24 (2000): 97; “Genes, Drugs and Race,” Nature Genetics 29 (2001): 239.
• 4 There is a tendency among proper-thinking people to dismiss The Bell Curve cavalierly, as both wrong-headed and refuted, without actually saying why. Many things wrong, and one has an obligation to say what. My own ‘genealogical’ objections are stated in a piece in The London Review of Books , January 26, 1995.
• 5 Frederick Kahn, “How a Drug Becomes ‘Ethnic’: Law, Commerce, and the Production of Racial Categories in Medicine,” Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics 4 (2004): 46.
• 6 Anne L. Taylor, “Combination of Isosorbide Dinitrate and Hydralazine in Blacks with Heart Failure,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004): 2049–2057.
• 7 This also matters to renal transplants. See Pauline C. Creemers and Delawir Kahn, “A Unique African HLA Haplotype May Identify a Population at Increased Risk for Kidney Graft Rejection,” Transplantation 65 (1998): 285–288.
• 8 For HLA differentiation, see T. D. Lee, A. Lee, and W. X. Shi, “HLA-A, -B, -D and -DQ Antigens in Black North Americans,” Tissue Antigens (1991): 79–83. For maps, see, for example, one of the essays in the November Nature Genetics issue referenced in the text: Sarah A. Tishkoff and Kenneth K. Kidd, “Implications of Biogeography of Human Populations for ‘Race’ and Medicine,” Nature Genetics Supplement 36 (2004): 521–527.
• 9 Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern Racism,” in West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An AfroAmerican Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1982), 47–65.

Argument: Why Race Matters in International Relations

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Why Race Matters in International Relations

Western dominance and white privilege permeate the field. it’s time to change that..

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Race is not a perspective on international relations; it is a central organizing feature of world politics. Anti-Japanese racism guided and sustained U.S. engagement in World War II, and broader anti-Asian sentiment influenced the development and structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the Cold War, racism and anti-communism were inextricably linked in the containment strategy that defined Washington’s approach to Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And today race shapes threat perception and responses to violent extremism, inside and outside the “war on terror.” Yet mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship denies race as essential to understanding the world, to the cost of the field’s integrity.

Take the “big three” IR paradigms: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. These dominant frames for understanding global politics are built on raced and racist intellectual foundations that limit the field’s ability to answer important questions about international security and organization. Core concepts, like anarchy and hierarchy, are raced : They are rooted in discourses that center and favor Europe and the West. These concepts implicitly and explicitly pit “developed” against “undeveloped,” “modern” against “primitive,” “civilized” against “uncivilized.” And their use is racist : These invented binaries are used to explain subjugation and exploitation around the globe

While realism and liberalism were built on Eurocentrism and used to justify white imperialism, this fact is not widely acknowledged in the field. For instance, according to neorealists, there exists a “balance of power” between and among “great powers.” Most of these great powers are, not incidentally, white-majority states, and they sit atop the hierarchy, with small and notably less-white powers organized below them. In a similar vein, raced hierarchies and conceptions of control ground the concept of cooperation in neoliberal thought: Major powers own the proverbial table, set the chairs, and arrange the place settings.

Constructivism, which rounds out the “big three” approaches, is perhaps best positioned to tackle race and racism. Constructivists reject the as-given condition of anarchy and maintain that anarchy, security, and other concerns are socially constructed based on shared ideas, histories, and experiences. Yet with few notable exceptions , constructivists rarely acknowledge how race shapes what is shared.

Despite the dominance of the “big three” in the modern study of IR, many of the arguments they advance, such as the balance of power, are not actually supported by evidence outside of modern Europe. Consider the democratic peace theory. The theory makes two key propositions: that democracies are less likely to go to war than are nondemocracies, and that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other. The historical record shows that democracies have actually not been less likely to fight wars—if you include their colonial conquests. Meanwhile, in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, democratizing states have experienced more internal conflicts than their less-democratic peers. Yet leaders in the West have invoked  democratic peace theory to justify invading and occupying less-democratic, and notably less-white, countries.

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip ride in a parade through the British colony of Nigeria in 1956 as students wave Union Jack pennants. SIMON MICHOU/Paris Match via Getty Images

This is a key element of IR’s racial exclusion: The state system that IR seeks to explain arises from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and established European principles of statehood and sovereignty. Far from 17th-century relics, these principles are enshrined in the United Nations Charter—the foundation for global governance since 1945. But non-European nations did not voluntarily adopt European understandings of statehood and sovereignty, as IR scholars often mythologize. Instead, Europe, justified by Westphalia, divided the world between the modern, “civilized” states and conquered those which they did not think belonged in the international system.

IR scholar Sankaran Krishna has argued  that, because IR privileges theorizing over historical description and analysis, the field enables this kind of whitewashing. Western concepts are prioritized at the expense of their applicability in the world. Krishna called this “a systematic politics of forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question of race.”

Importantly, IR has not always ignored race. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, foundational texts invoked race as the linchpin holding together colonial administration and war. Belief in white people’s biological and sociological supremacy offered a tidy dualism between the civilized and the savage that justified the former’s murderous exploitation of the latter. Paul Samuel Reinsch, a founder of modern IR and foreign policy, christened the 20th century as the “age of national imperialism.” He concluded that states “endeavor to increase [their] resources … through the absorption or exploitation of undeveloped regions and inferior races.” Yet, he assured readers that this was “not inconsistent with respect for … other nationalities” because states avoid exerting control over “highly civilized nations.”

Thinkers’ attention to race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries spread into academic journals and research institutions. For example, the Journal of Race Development— the first academic IR journal, established in 1910—advanced racist treatises , including on the inability of “native races” to develop states without colonialism. Nonetheless, the journal’s pages also included sharp critiques from W.E.B. Du Bois and other scholars who were critical of European mercantilism. In 1919, the journal was rebranded as the Journal of International Relations without substantive changes and, in 1922, its successor, Foreign Affairs , was born.

The mid-20th century brought about some shifts in IR thinking and in foreign policy. Black IR scholars, primarily working out of Howard University, developed a strong theoretical tradition that resists white-supremacist privileging of U.S. and European empires. Anti-colonial revolutions in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s further problematized the promise of empire built into realist frameworks and the idealism of paternalist cooperation integral to liberal thought.

Mainstream IR theory, however, did not adapt or evolve its position on race. Most IR scholars just stopped engaging with the subject altogether. Between 1945 and 1993, among the five major IR journals of the period— International Organization , International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution , Review of International Studies , and World Politics— only one published an article with the word “race” in the title. Another four articles included “minorities” and 13 included “ethnicity.” Since then, mainstream IR has neglected race in theorizing, in historical explanation, and in prescription, and shuttled race (and gender) to the side as “other perspectives.” When IR scholars do engage with race, it is often in discussions of outwardly raced issues such as colonialism.

Yet one cannot comprehend world politics while ignoring race and racism. Textbooks that neglect historical and modern slavery when explaining development and globalization obscure the realities of state-building and deny the harms committed in the process. Similarly, when scholarship fails to call attention to the role that race plays in Western nations’ use of international law as a pretext for military intervention, it provides cover for the modern-day equivalent of “civilizing missions.” Likewise, studies of trade and dispute settlement almost always overlook modern arbitration’s deep roots in the transatlantic slave trade. This history is often lost in analyses of wins and losses in negotiations .

Race and the racism of historical statecraft are inextricable from the modern study and practice of international relations. They are also not artefacts: Race continues to shape international and domestic threat perceptions and consequent foreign policy; international responses to immigrants and refugees; and access to health and environmental stability.

A woman takes part in a protest against President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban outside the White House in Washington on Feb. 4, 2017. Race continues to shape international responses to immigrants and refugees. MOLLY RILEY/AFP via Getty Images

Because mainstream IR does not take race or racism seriously, it also does not take diversity and inclusion in the profession seriously. In the United States, which is the largest producer of IR scholarship, only 8 percent of scholars identify as black or Latino, compared to 12 percent of scholars in comparative politics and 14 percent in U.S. politics. And that’s despite the fact that the issues that IR scholars study, such as war, migration, human rights, development, and climate change, have a disproportionate impact on black people, indigenous people, and people of color.

There are a number of reasons for this imbalance. First, there is a pervasive and corrosive tendency among white scholars to assume that scholars of color study race, ethnicity, and identity politics in the United States or in an area-studies context. Though scholars of color do work in these areas, there is no intellectual reason to expect that they all do so. This tendency to presume, even assign, where different people belong communicates to IR scholars of color that they are not welcome.

The International Studies Association (ISA), the main professional association for IR scholars and practitioners, does not offer a research or conference section on race. Nor do any of its organized sections mention race in their descriptions. While ISA does have several identity-related caucuses, including the Women’s Caucus for International Studies, there is no caucus for scholars of color. Scholars of color also experience overt racism within ISA and other professional associations. In 2018, Meg Guliford described her experience as a black scholar at an ISA conference, where three separate attendees assumed she was hotel staff and one asked when she planned to bring out more food.

How IR is taught also perpetuates the research and professional inequalities we detail above. In a 2014 survey of IR professors, nearly 40 percent reported organizing their courses by the traditional paradigms of IR studies. Since much paradigmatic work is dominated by white men and is guided by Eurocentrism, women, nonwhite people, and issues of race and racism are displaced in course syllabi.

Interestingly, how professors organize their courses does not necessarily reflect their own approach to studying IR. In that same survey, 26 percent of respondents reported that they do not use paradigmatic analysis. This casts even more doubt on the paradigms as core, yet exclusionary, frameworks.

IR scholars cannot cast off the field’s intellectual history. But neither can scholars accept it uncritically. Western dominance and white privilege permeate IR scholarship, teaching, and professional associations, to the cost of the field’s integrity, and to the cost of the relevance and appropriateness of our advice to policymakers. To help remedy these problems, IR scholars should focus their efforts on three initiatives.

First, those who teach IR must address race and racism in the field and acknowledge the usefulness of critical approaches. This means integrating scholarly works on race in undergraduate and graduate courses, and not as a segregated “week on race” at the end of the term. Despite the field’s overarching exclusion in this area, there are excellent scholars working on race in IR .

Introductory courses could also be organized around issues—for instance, interstate conflict, human rights, environmental politics—in order to create more points of entry for relevant scholarship and for nonwhite students. Second, universities must improve representation among scholars and increase diversity in intellectual thought. IR programs should strive to recruit, train ,  and retain diverse graduate and faculty candidates who can offer new perspectives and drive innovation . Third, IR professional associations must become more inclusive. One concrete step would be for ISA and other IR hubs to organize sections on race.

These steps are straightforward and feasible. Those in positions of power and influence must simply have the will and do the work.

Kelebogile Zvobgo is an assistant professor of government at the College of William & Mary and founder and director of the International Justice Lab. Her research engages questions in human rights, transitional justice, and international law and courts, and has been published in journals including International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Human Rights. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs , Foreign Policy , and the Washington Post , among others. Twitter:  @kelly_zvobgo

Meredith Loken is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a non-residential fellow at the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Twitter:  @meredithloken

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On Race Matters and Social Justice

• Essays, Peer-Reviewed Articles, and Other Web Resources
• Video Presentation About this Guide
• What Can I Do?
• Anti-Racism Resources
• Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus from JStor
• On Police and Policing
• Podcasts on the Topic
• Selected Books that Inspire, Instruct, and Inform
• The Times, Are They A-Changing?

Resources for the Classroom

• A Syllabus for Students When Dealing with Law Enforcement Created in 2014 by Nate Bowling, Teacher, Writer, Podcaster and 2016 Teacher of the Year Finalist. It includes a handout for a workshop that he uses to teach his students on their rights when dealing with law enforcement, particularly dealing with the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments.
• FBI releases Hate Crime Statistics new! The 2021 hate crimes data, submitted by 15,136 law enforcement agencies, provide information about the offenses, victims, offenders, and locations of hate crimes. Of these agencies who submitted incident reports, there were 7262 hate crime incidents involving 8673 offenses. Over 64.8% of these hate crimes were ethnic/race/ancestry related.
• Teaching Resources from the American History Association From the American History Association, this website provides a list of resources in response to ongoing racist violence in the United States. AHA envisions utilization of these web resources by the following people: "Teachers can use them in classrooms to help students understand the history of the present; journalists can draw on them to provide historical context for current events; researchers can draw on them to inform future scholarship. Due to the nature of this history, many of the resources contain references to violence and assault."
• Talking About Race Tools to talk about race from Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture. Tools are available in three categories for: an educator; a parent or care-giver; or a person committed to equity.
• The 1619 Project Neatly summarized by Diversity Best Practices, "The 1619 Project" is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country's history by placing consequences of slavery and contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our narrative." Curriculum, guides and activities for students can be found at the Pulitzer Center: https://pulitzercenter.org/1619. Also available as a Podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.html
• Structural Racism: A Maynard Institute Case Study A list of 250+ studies, dating back to 2010, from institutes, universities, and reputable newspapers on the subject of racial disparities in various aspects of American life. Categories include: housing, health, employment, education, criminal justice, COVID-19, and wealth. Many of the studies were conducted by The Urban Institute, Brookings Institution, The Marshall Project, The Vera Institute of Justice, Pew Research Center, Education Trust, The Sentencing project, the Center for American Progress, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
• Black Freedom Struggles in the United States: A Selection of Primary Sources A curated selection of primary sources for teaching and learning about the struggles and triumps of Black Americans. Developed with in put from Black history scholars and advisors, this website is freely available to libraries. The information is organized into six (6) crucial phases of the U.S. Black freedom struggle: i) Slavery and Abolitionist Movement (1790 -1860); ii) Civil War and Reconstruction Era (1861-1877); iii) Jim Crow Era to the Great Depression (1878-1932); iv) New Deal and World War II (1933-1945); v) Civil Rights and Black power Movement (1946-1975); and vi) Contemporary Era (1976-present). All materials are from ProQuest collections.
• The State of Black America Since its first appearance in 1976 under the stewardship of the late Mr. Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., the organization’s fifth president, the State of Black America® remains one of the most highly- anticipated benchmarks and sources for thought leadership around racial equality in America. The report explores the inequities across America’s economics, employment, education, health, housing, criminal justice, and civic participation systems through research and the words of our contributors. Each edition contains penetrating commentary and insightful analysis from recognized authorities and leading figures in politics, the corporate and tech sectors, the nonprofit arena, academia, and popular culture. [Taken from the "About" webpage]

Essays on the Topic

• I Can't Even Enjoy This' #BlackBirderWeek Organizer Shares Her Struggle As a Black Scientist An interview from "Science Careers" with Corina Newsome who expresses challenges she experiences as a Black scientist who works outdoors. She also provides recommendations on improving the situation. Written by Kate Langin, this article appeared in Science Magazine on June 5, 2020. The CSI Library has a current subscription to Science Magazine .
• Fix the System, Not the Students new! From Science Magazine , this article discusses that rather than giving students the help they need, Physicist Mary James and other Black physicists say, the priesthood too often decides that those students are unworthy of joining the profession. That way of thinking is so common in physics that it even has a name. Diversity scholars call it the deficit model. Written by Jeffrey Mervis and published on March 2nd, 2022. The CSI Library has a current subscription to Science Magazine .
• Confronting Racism and Supporting Asian Communities in the Wake of COVID-19 This article was featured in The Blog of the Urban Institute's Race and Ethnicity section. It was written by Danielle Kwon and published on March 24, 2020.
• Study Finds Black Access to Healthcare Lags in States That Show a High Level of Structural Racism The results showed that the higher the level of racism in a given state, the less access Black people in that state had to health care. The higher the level of racism in a given state, the more access White people had to health care. In addition, the worse the state’s racism score, the higher the quality of care White people reported receiving. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education , July 26, 2021. The CSI Library has a current subscription to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education .
• Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequalities at Universities Author, James Thomas, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, discusses his book of the above title with Editor, Scot Jaschik. Published in Inside Higher Ed , June 16, 2020.
• Higher Ed's Toothless Response to the Killing of George Floyd Subtitled "Statements by college leaders reflect an unholy alchemy of risk management, legal liabilities, and trustee anxiety," this article challenges colleges leaders to act rather than use superficial language. It was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education of June 8, 2020. It was written by two professors from Carnegie Mellon University - Jason England, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Richard Purcell, Associate Professor of English and Director of Literary and Cultural Studies Program. The CSI Library has a current subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education .
• Urban Policing WITHOUT BRUTALITY Taken from the abstract, this article "discusses the improvement of policing process in Cincinnati, Ohio. Topics covered include the establishment of the Citizen Complaint Authority (CCA) in Cincinnati, the reasons that motivated the city government to adopt a far-reaching police reform and the city's efforts to further improve transparency, community engagement and diversity." Written by Nathalie Baptiste for The American Prospect , Summer 2015. The CSI Library has a current subscription to The American Prospect .
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The Morning

Race and politics.

We’re covering the rightward shift among voters of color.

By David Leonhardt

After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many political scientists and pundits came forth with a simple explanation. Trump had won, they said, because of white Americans’ racial resentment.

These analysts looked at surveys and argued that the voters who had allowed Trump to win were distinguished not by social class, economic worries or any other factor but by their racial fears. “Another study shows Trump won because of racial anxieties — not economic distress,” as a typical headline, in The Intercept, put it.

I never found this argument to be persuasive. Yes, race played a meaningful role in Trump’s victory, given his long history of remarks demeaning people of color. But politics is rarely monocausal. And there were good reasons — including Barack Obama’s earlier success with Trump voters — to believe that the 2016 election was complex, too.

Eight years later, the “it’s all racial resentment” argument doesn’t look merely questionable. It looks wrong.

Skewed polls?

Since Trump’s victory, a defining feature of American politics has been the rightward shift of voters of color. Asian, Black and Hispanic voters have all become less likely to support Democratic candidates and more likely to support Republicans, including Trump.

In each group, the trend is pronounced among working-class voters, defined as those without a four-year college degree. (The Democrats’ performance among nonwhite voters with a college degree has held fairly stable.)

If anything, Democrats’ weakness among voters of colors appears to have intensified since 2022. Among white voters, President Biden has about as much support as he did four years ago, Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has pointed out . But Biden’s support among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters has plummeted. (My colleagues Jennifer Medina and Ruth Igielnik focused on the Latino shift in a recent article.)

This chart compares the 2020 results with the findings from the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll:

As John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter at The Financial Times, wrote last week : “I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the U.S. today, and one of the most poorly understood.”

This newsletter is the first of a two-part series about the development. Today, I hope to convince you that the trend is real and not simply, as some Democrats hope, a reflection of inaccurate poll numbers. In part two, I’ll look more closely at the likely causes.

Young populists

It’s true that polls are not the same as elections, and Biden may improve his standing by November. With far more campaign cash than Trump, Biden will have a chance to frame the election as a choice between the two, rather than a referendum on the country’s condition.

But the evidence for the trend is much stronger than the 2024 polls. A decade ago, many Democrats assumed that the extremely high levels of support they received from voters of color during Obama’s presidency would continue. They haven’t. In 2022, for instance, the party’s disappointing performance among nonwhite voters helped Republicans win the national popular vote in House elections. This year, Biden may need to improve on the party’s 2022 showing — which would be vastly different from what polls now show — to win re-election.

“There’s been a lot of whistling past the graveyard about this,” Nate Silver wrote in his newsletter about the trend. “Dems ought to invest more time in figuring out why this is happening instead of hoping that the polls are skewed.”

The most helpful frame is social class. In many ways, the rightward shift of voters of color is surprising, given this country’s history of racial politics. I certainly did not expect the Trump era to feature a narrowing of racial polarization.

But when viewed through a class lens, the shift makes more sense. In much of the world, working-class voters, across racial groups, have become attracted to a populism that leans right while sometimes including left-wing economic ideas, such as trade restrictions. This populism is skeptical of elites, political correctness, high levels of immigration and other forms of globalization.

Today’s populists “are more diverse than the stereotypical ‘angry old white men’ who, we are frequently told, will soon be replaced by a new generation of tolerant Millennials,” Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, two British scholars of politics, have written . Indeed, Democrats today particularly struggle with young voters of color, Nate Cohn has explained.

The old racial-resentment story about Trump’s victory was alluring to many progressives because it absolved them of responsibility. If Trump’s appeal was all about racism, there was no honorable way for Democrats to win back their previous supporters.

The true story is both more challenging and more hopeful. The multiracial, predominantly working-class group of Americans who have soured on mainstream politics and modern liberalism are not all hateful and ignorant. They are frustrated, and their political loyalties are up for grabs.

Related: I discuss the art of middlebrow politics in a Times review of two new books about U.S. history.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-hamas war.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East. He is there to push for a temporary cease-fire in Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Senate Republicans remotely after Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, criticized him and called for a new election in Israel.

Why isn’t aid getting to people in Gaza? It’s complicated, but inspections and violence have contributed to delays. See graphics that explain the issue .

More International News

Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar, is resigning from his post . His resignation was a surprise .

The E.U. has found a way to make Moscow pay for weapons for Ukraine: using interest earned on frozen Russian assets.

A Mexican cartel is swindling retirees. Call centers offer to buy seniors’ timeshare properties then drain their bank accounts .

2024 Elections

Trump said he’d likely support a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy with some exceptions, calling it a reasonable compromise.

Biden’s campaign had more than twice the amount of money the Trump campaign had at the end of last month.

California voters narrowly approved a $6.4 billion bond to help homeless people with mental illnesses and addiction .

Democratic lawyers plan to challenge third-party candidates’ efforts to get on the ballot . They fear the candidates might siphon votes from Biden in swing states.

Texas Border

An appeals court heard arguments over a Texas law that lets the police arrest migrants who illegally enter the state. The law is blocked for now .

Texas has been testing the limits of its state-run border control. Explore this stretch of the southern border to see how.

The fight over the border is an example of how some states are circumventing gridlock in Washington. Other Republican states are working on immigration bills .

The E.P.A. issued new tailpipe pollution limits meant to ensure that most new cars are electric or hybrid by 2032. Fossil fuel companies are likely to challenge the regulations in court .

A record-breaking heat wave hit West Africa in mid-February. Climate change made this heat 10 times as likely, a report found.

The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged but signaled that it was likely to cut rates three times this year.

Reddit priced its shares high for its initial public offering. The site’s journey from toxic cesspool to trusted news source is a content moderation success story , Kevin Roose writes.

Other Big Stories

A bipartisan bill to fund the government contains wins for both parties . Democrats reauthorized a program that fights H.I.V. worldwide; Republicans secured cuts to foreign aid.

A group of politically connected lawyers made millions from one of the largest Medicaid settlements in history, a Times investigation found.

The U.S. hit a new low in the World Happiness Report — 23rd place — in large part because of unhappiness among people under 30.

Oprah’s special on weight loss highlighted how the industry is rebranding . Telling people obesity is a disease and not their fault changes decades of messaging, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes.

New York’s governor wants the subway system to be safe . She should start with making stations accessible for disabled people, Julie Kim writes.

Senegal’s president, who refuses to leave office, threatens the country’s hard-won stability , Boubacar Boris Diop writes.

Here is a column by Pamela Paul on the funny stories behind our injuries .

MORNING READS

Preserved remains: This is what village life was like in Britain 3,000 years ago .

Mental health: Climate cafes are offering a place for Americans to discuss their anxiety about the changing planet .

Antique: A British woman bought a brooch at a fair. She didn’t know how much it was worth .

Talking or yapping? TikTok has repurposed an old term .

Lives Lived: Martin Greenfield made suits for presidents, movie stars and athletes. For years, none knew the origin of his expertise: He learned to sew at Auschwitz. Greenfield died at 95 .

M.L.B.: The Dodgers fired Ippei Mizuhara, translator for superstar Shohei Ohtani, after the player’s representatives accused Mizuhara of “massive theft” to use Ohtani’s money for gambling purposes.

March Madness: The first round of the men’s tournament tips off at noon Eastern. Sixteen games will air today. (Before the first game begins, you still have time to join The Morning’s bracket pools for the men’s and women’s tournaments. Let us know you did with this Google form .)

N.F.L.: Mike Williams signed a one-year contract with the New York Jets yesterday; a breakfast sandwich may have convinced him.

ARTS AND IDEAS

How it started: A century ago tonight, a dinner party in New York set in motion one of the most influential cultural movements of the 20th century. Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke, two Black academic titans, gathered the brightest of Harlem’s creative and political scene to mingle with white purveyors of culture. The relationships formed that night would soon blossom into the Harlem Renaissance.

At the time, little was written in the news media about the party. But Veronica Chambers, a Times journalist, and Michelle May-Curry, a curator in Washington, D.C., have reconstructed the evening . They used rarely seen letters and other archival material.

More on culture

Letters from a love triangle: Eric Clapton’s handwritten messages , being auctioned this week, shed light on how Clapton wooed Pattie Boyd away from George Harrison.

Late-night hosts joked about Trump and March Madness.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Serve seared boneless chicken thighs over a bed of herbs, browned whole garlic cloves and greens.

Buy a classic white T-shirt. (For men and women .)

Use the best tumbler .

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was fanciful .

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku and Connections .

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox . Reach our team at [email protected] .

David Leonhardt runs The Morning , The Times’s flagship daily newsletter. Since joining The Times in 1999, he has been an economics columnist, opinion columnist, head of the Washington bureau and founding editor of the Upshot section, among other roles. More about David Leonhardt

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