Michael L. Krenn
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252038877
- eISBN:
- 9780252096839
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252038877.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter considers the influence of Cold War politics and policies exerted on journalist and State Department spokesperson Carl Rowan during the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that Rowan's contention ...
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This chapter considers the influence of Cold War politics and policies exerted on journalist and State Department spokesperson Carl Rowan during the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that Rowan's contention that “the civil rights issue was being dealt with in an effective and speedy manner” was not an indication of his naïve optimism about America's racial problem, but rather speaks to his understanding of the need for propaganda in America's struggle against communism. Once the Cold War was well over, as his book The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call attests, Rowan considered America's racial problems in a much less optimistic light.Less
This chapter considers the influence of Cold War politics and policies exerted on journalist and State Department spokesperson Carl Rowan during the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that Rowan's contention that “the civil rights issue was being dealt with in an effective and speedy manner” was not an indication of his naïve optimism about America's racial problem, but rather speaks to his understanding of the need for propaganda in America's struggle against communism. Once the Cold War was well over, as his book The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call attests, Rowan considered America's racial problems in a much less optimistic light.
Adriane Lentz-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- March 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190695668
- eISBN:
- 9780190093143
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190695668.003.0017
- Subject:
- History, Political History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in ...
More
This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.Less
This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.
