Cold War socialist rivalry once pressured American racial equality, but that pressure is gone

Evidence

Allport, writing at the height of the Cold War, also felt that moral uneasiness about “an American dilemma” was exacerbated by international pressures from socialist ideologies that privileged equality. Contemporary scholarship sustains that view for his era (e.g., Klinkner & Smith, 1999). But with the demise of the Soviet Union, and the triumph of free-market values over socialism throughout the world, that is no longer so true. Even the Europeans are backing away from the welfare state, and have their own issues of internal ethnic strife and ethnocentrism. Many parts of the Third World exhibit far deadlier ethnocentrism than does America, as in the genocide in Rwanda. There is no longer much international moral pressure on the United States to become more racially egalitarian. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2196

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how international competition and geopolitical legitimation shape domestic moral reform — parallels to ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s treatment of how structural legitimacy anchors social orders. — 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 competition had made America court Muslims as people of color — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 236