All through the summer, we’re revisiting some of Foreign Affairs’ best long reads that shed light on secret histories and untold stories in international affairs. This week, we’re sharing Zachariah Mampilly’s 2022 essay on W. E. B. Du Bois’s forgotten contributions to debates on U.S. foreign policy and the international order.
“It’s hard to argue that Du Bois, perhaps the most celebrated Black intellectual of all time, is underrecognized,” Mampilly writes. But although he is remembered and celebrated for his work on civil rights, Du Bois remains underappreciated when it comes to his thinking on global politics, where his work diagnosed ills in the imperial and Cold War orders that persist today. Due in part to his leftward turn toward communism in the McCarthy era, Du Bois’s contributions to international relations theory were discarded as the twentieth century wore on—and this erasure, Mampilly writes, “represents an enormous loss.”
For Du Bois, Mampilly argues, the struggles for equality at home and abroad were deeply intertwined—and it was in no small part his engagement with international politics that shaped his evolving views of the country’s racial and class hierarchies. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Massachusetts; his lifetime spanned not only the post–Civil War Reconstruction period and the Jim Crow era but also the decades of the United States’ emergence as a leading global power, including its imperial expansion into Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. In his writings on international relations, in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, “Du Bois argued that the domestic could never be divorced from the global, and that Washington’s quest for a liberal order could never be reconciled with a Jim Crow system at home.”
Du Bois’s insights on the importance of race and domestic politics in foreign policy remain relevant today, Mampilly writes. For that reason, “rediscovering his work serves more than a purely historical purpose.” For Du Bois, “the success of democracy in the United States required that political and economic equality be extended not only to U.S. citizens” but to all people around the world. “It is an uncompromising and inspiring vision; embracing it cost Du Bois dearly,” Mampilly observes. “But it may be just what the country needs as it faces the waning of American imperium.”
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