Dear White /IR/ People1

First and foremost, Vitalis “White World Order, Black Power Politics: the Birth of
American International Relations” (referred to from now on as WWO,BPP) is a
masterpiece which, “is a history of the men, overwhelmingly, who argue about
race and empire (...) in order to advance the new science of international
relations” (p. 20). In fact, it is a publication far from a cliché written by a racial-
ally-author with the proposal of being a whining mea culpa. He argues in detail,
through 180-solid-pages to outline how racism - and its entanglements - is
intrinsic to the field so-called IR. “What is new and important in this book is the
discovery that the intellectuals, institutions, and arguments that constituted
international relations were shaped by and often directly concerned with
advancing strategies to preserve and extend that hegemony...” (p. 2). By that
hegemony, he refers to the establishment properly, the world hegemony of
whites.

Primarily, it is ironic that Robert Vitalis is writing about how his field of study is
overly saturated by white voice, and yet he is merely another white author.
However, he writes in the capacity of a racial ally who reveals the pioneer
thought of the black internationalist scholarly, the ideas of the “Howard school
of international relations theory, whose leading thinkers alone evinced a
commitment to understanding and writing about white world supremacy from
the standpoint of its victims” (p. 5)

Indeed, WWO,BPP is a book that assumes an ideological position as well as an

engaged discourse; its narrative stands out against the status quo, and it is
organized in a chronological four parts, separated into nine chapters: “each of
the four parts focuses primarily on a distinct pair of scholars: W.E.B Du Bois
and John William Burgess (1898 to World War I), Alain Locke and Raymond
Leslie Buell (the interwar era), Ralph Bunche and Edward Mead Earle (World

1Dear White People is a U.S series on Netflix that follows several black college students at an
Ivy League institution, touching on issues surrounding North American race relations.
War II), and Rayford Logan and Harold Isaacs (the 1950s). The last chapter is
(...) to recount the career of Merze Tate (p. 20).

As a matter of priority, the utter argument that I would like to claim is regarding
the effects and affects – by juxtaposition the (AE)ffects 2 – that preserving the
discipline as a white redoubt has generated in terms of a matter which belongs
to the academia:
How it helps in creating, perpetuating the so-called IR Fables, which
work as a smokescreen dislocating the heartwood of the debate from race
relations to topics such as security, defence or foreign affairs. "International
Relations became the site of study of the relations among the "white states" or,
as the "biological myth" in Hans Kohn's words, gave way to the "spatial myth",
the "great powers” (p. 22). Similarly, as the proper title is self explicative: The
Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and
19193.
As a direct consequence from the latter argument, to what extent it has
influenced the way that IR has been researched and published in terms of
scientific production. “Virtually every history of international relations to date
turns out to be about white political scientists teaching in white departments and
publishing in white journals (p 13). Likewise, how IR theory has been taught in
the classrooms of the universities from the ancient past until nowadays.
“International relations today remains a white, mainly male rampart that exhibits
routine anxieties about the various threats beyond the walls” (p.180).
Furthermore, Vitalis describes a current tragic-satiric scenario relating to the
scholars in their introductory contact with the topic: “an even more reliable
generalization is that all those young professors and graduate students in the
intro courses will be white” (p. 6)
Finally, the sabotage of the Howard School as a foundation able to
provide sources of “truth”, fonts of knowledge – counter information of anti-

2
We might think of this as: Affective Effect or, if you prefer: Effective Affect. Or, using the
grapheme æ, we can encompass both affect and effect by creating a new word: Æffect (page
119). Duncombe, S. (2016) Does it work? The æffect of activist art. Social Research 83(1),
115-134
3
In like manner, 'The Myth of the ‘First Great Debate’' by Peter Wilson Review of International
Studies 24, no. 05 (1998): 1-16.
colonial/racial theorist that was combated vis-à-vis with theories based on elitist
acquaintance, social Darwinism, cultural anthropology and so forth – could be
linked with the core of Freires4 allegory in respect to education viewed as a
weapon to free oneself from the darkness. "The absence from international
relations of all three – black faculty, students and theory – is a striking
difference from disciplines such as English, Anthropology and History" (p.13).
Moreover, the undertaking of African American and Africana Studies
departments and programs, which are fundamentally correlated with the civil
rights movements in the middle of the twenty-century in the U.S can also be
interpreted as a camouflaged strategy orchestrated to maintain dominance –
not merely an improvement as a result from the black insurgencies. “One of the
unwritten agenda items in the late turn to building African studies and a national
African Studies Association (...) was keeping governance of the field in the
hands of white social scientists and foundation administrators” (p. 22)

Although the book sets a milestone of its analysis, the geographical space of
the U.S, circumscribed in a determined lapse of time-period, it already can be a
crucial spring relating to the study of IR (its origins and transformations) in
comparison with other English speaking nations, as well as non-English-
speaking realities. Thus, WWO,BPP settles itself as prior literature that has to
be widely spread, re-read, disseminated as a virus in the minds of those are
specific interested in the field as well as to who would like to understand to what
extent racism and racial conflicts have such an influence in moulding contours
of our social experience.

4 Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly.
Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is
rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion (p.47)
Bibliography References

De Carvalho B, Leira H and Hobson JM. (2011) The Big Bangs of IR: The
Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919. Millennium -
Journal of International Studies 39: 735–758.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Opressed: translated by Myra Bergman Ramos;

with an introduction by Donald Macedo. New York, 2000.

Vitalis, Robert. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of
International Relations in America. US, 2015.