Cold War competition pressured the US toward race-neutral governance.

Evidence

The post-World War II period saw the emergence of nationalized desegregating efforts – in the army, the courts, on the streets, in buses and schools – prompted not only by moral and internal political imperatives but also by geopolitical Cold War competition and assertive local mass mobilization. “National interest” and foreign policy demands strongly encouraged if not necessitated public commitment to race-neutral governmentality. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 376

Categorization

• XREF: Geopolitics as a driver of domestic anti-racism policy — a now-familiar historiography (Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights genealogy) presented here as causal claim. — 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 and civil-rights pressure widened judicial definitions of whiteness — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 173; Cold War embarrassment and northern black migration forced the desegregation of the armed forces. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3907 (+1 more)