Cold War and the Color Line: American Foreign Policy in the Era of Globalization, The

POLITICS Thomas Borstelmann. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Foreign Policy in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 369 pp. Photographs. Notes. Index. $35.00. Cloth.

American studies used to exist in a moderate vacuum, as investigations of U.S. culture, politics, and ethnicity were once largely focused on domestic shores. Recently that has been changing. One notable feature of that change has been a spate of studies on relations between American (and especially African American) racial politics and culture, and the broader world. Kate Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain (Duke, 2002), Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire (Cornell, 1997), and Brenda Plummer's Rising Wind (North Carolina, 1997) are three among such studies. Now Thomas Borstelmann, a Cornell historian and author of an earlier book focused on the U.S. and South Africa in the 1950s, has published a broader work on the intersections between U.S. foreign policy and domestic racial politics from 1945 to 1990.

The book is organized by U.S. presidential administrations; separate chapters are devoted to Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, while the stretch from Nixon to George H. W. Bush is compressed into the last chapter as the narrative accelerates. Borstelmann's evidence ranges widely. At times he offers broad-brush parallels, in sentences such as "Just as [in the middle 1950s] white Southerners reluctantly gave up peonage, prison labor leasing, and frequent lynchings, so Western Europeans relinquished most of their direct colonial control of the Third World" (101). At other times he reveals specific linkages gleaned from his prodigious archival research, quoting, for example, a U.S. State Department memorandum of roughly 1952 that said "'no American problem receives more wide-spread attention, especially in dependent areas, than our treatment of racial minorities, particularly the Negro'" (76). Elsewhere Borstelmann includes sharp details, reporting, for example, that Moscow Radio mockingly included Little Rock, Arkansas, in its daily list of cities overflown by Sputnik I, which had been launched just after the start of Little Rock's school integration crisis.

African studies scholars will be interested in The Cold War and the Color Line because of the many insights offered into African political history. The book regularly touches on the American dimensions of important African developments, from the growing wave of independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s to controversies over Patrice Lumumba, Eritrean liberation, the Suez canal, Cuban troops in Angola and Ethiopia, the continued Portuguese colonies, and much more. Substantial analysis is devoted to South Africa and Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, from an interesting racial/American point of view.

The book's main shortcoming is its overwhelming focus on the thoughts and actions of white American elites in the political and policy establishments. Though the book offers insightful summaries of six American presidents' attitudes toward race and snapshots of four others, no remotely comparable analysis is given to major influential African American internationalists such as Du Bois, Robeson, Bunche, and King. Borstelmann analyzes the Bandung conference well, but he relegates to a passing footnote Richard Wright's important book on that subject-this in a study of American foreign policy from a racial perspective! Likewise, the American interactions (including racial interactions) of various African (to say nothing of South Asian, Latin American, and other Third World) leaders are barely noted. Nkrumah's and Azikiwe's education in the U.S. goes unmentioned, as does the rich appeal that African America (and specific African Americans) had for ANC leaders and indeed all black South Africans from the ANC's 1912 founding to the present.

Fortunately, numerous other studies, a number of which Borstelmann cites all too cursorily in his third footnote, have also begun to address these questions. But perhaps the book's limitations are less those of Borstelmann as a scholar than of his book's adherence to the traditionally narrow conception of foreign policy studies, even those that focus 011 global and racial matters. Though we must, applaud this important book, we might also suggest that The Cold War and the Color Line could more accurately and narrowly have been subtitled "Perspectives from U.S. White Elites."

David Chioni Moore

Macalester College

St. Paul, Minnesota

Copyright African Studies Association Apr 2003
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