Cold War competition with the Soviets made domestic racism a national security liability

Evidence

Concerns with racism extended beyond civil society to the US government fighting the Cold War. The Soviet Union pointed to rampant anti- Black and anti-Asian racism in its claims that American democracy was a fraud. American racism became a national security issue. As a result, the United States needed to exude the moral high ground to obtain cooperation from non-European nations in its Cold War policy of Communist containment. But the narrative that American democracy was superior to Communist dictatorship was not credible without civil rights reforms. Nor could the US government credibly claim that American democracy brought freedom to all its citizens. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 465

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did Soviet propaganda on American racism actually shape or merely coincide with the timing of US civil rights reforms? Aziz implies causation but the correlation alone is debated in the historiography.
• XREF: Connects to the observation in the soundscape books about how external political threats can reframe domestic perceptual issues—here geopolitical pressure reframing racism as a state security problem. — connects to: The Soviets blockaded Berlin by rail and road in 1948 — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 653; Cold War threat produced unprecedented internal cohesion in capitalist societies — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 160; US Cold War anti-communism reshaped the drafting of social and economic rights — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 190 (+2 more)