Books in Brief: Racial Influence on American Foreign Policy

Racial Influence on American Foreign Policy, edited by George W. Shepherd Jr. (Basic Books, 238 pp., $6.95). Most of the contributors to this volume are seized by the famous dictum of W. E. B. DuBois: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Their intense emotional commitment to this proposition blots out all other considerations—clash of cultures, class conflict, ideological struggles, human history and experience—that reveal the oversimplification. Chinese feelings of superiority to every other group—yellow, brown, black and white—are well documented and constitute a sizable flaw in their hypothesis. Malay/Chinese, Arab/Israeli, Nigerian/Biafran, Pakistani/Indian, Irish Catholic/Protestant, Communist/non-Communist frictions, to mention a few major sources of conflict, are not problems of color. The only substantial contribution in this series of essays is made by Professor Robert A. Scalapino of Berkeley, who addresses himself primarily to the Far East and attempts to assess objectively how much prejudice of what kind exists where and when; he also shows that stereotypical views are not unchanging, but are affected by circumstances and experience. The black/white problem in the United States is, of course, real, but most of these authors abandon the tools of scholarship in attempting to show how it affects American foreign policy, or to what degree. They simply assert the identification of all blacks with all people of color anywhere, and in their distorted perspective they see South Africa as Problem Number One of the universe.