Cold War geopolitics made American 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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Walter White made a choice. He criticized Robeson’s efforts, accusing him of confusing “the public mind,” and tried to quash any further attempt to link black freedom in the United States to global struggles (a view that defined much of the politics of the previous decades—including his own and that of the NAACP). The United States had to assert its moral leadership in the world, and that required, White claimed, ending racial discrimination at home. The country’s oldest civil rights organization now believed that racial justice was a domestic matter—one that meant aligning our practices with national ideals and embracing anti-communism. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 450 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Cold War embarrassment and northern black migration forced the desegregation of the armed forces. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3907; Cold War geopolitics shaped which Muslim immigrants courts deemed racially white. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 173; Cold War competition with the Soviets made domestic racism a national security liability — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 465 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Cold War competition with the Soviets made domestic racism a national security liability #expands (0.98) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 465
• Cold War anticommunism reframed racial justice as a strictly domestic matter #complicates (0.79) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 450