Cold War competition over decolonizing markets drove US federal action against domestic discrimination

Evidence

In March 1946, Dean Acheson warned that the “existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect on our relations with other countries.” Acheson was a source as reliable as they came. He had headed the State Department’s delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which rebuilt the international capitalist system. President Harry S. Truman, who took over after Roosevelt died in 1945, listened to Acheson’s warning that globally circulating reports of discrimination, fanned by the flames of Russian media outlets, were harming US foreign policy and causing doors to shut on American businessmen, especially in the decolonizing non-White nations. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 905

Categorization

• XREF: Embodies Kendi’s core inversion: policy/self-interest (foreign policy, capitalist markets) drove anti-discrimination efforts, and the framing of racial discrimination as harming business/external relations casts the motive in material terms rather than ideational enlightenment. — connects to: US Cold War anti-communism reshaped the drafting of social and economic rights — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 190; Cold War America funded economics training in Latin America partly to counter Marxism — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1546