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This chapter presents Gunnar Myrdal’s novel An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) to illustrate the emergence of race novels and the values ascribed to literature about racial liberalism. Throughout the Cold War, race novels were as the primary tool of antiracism movements for discussing the notion of racial liberalism and to gain the support of white Americans against racial discrimination. This satirized the social and professional context of different race relations by dramatizing the failure of white Americans to help promote racial equality and the notion of the possibility that racial liberalism could be attained through philanthropy, academia, government, media, and race relations organizations.

This chapter discusses geopolitical aspects of the modern racial system in the post-World War II era. Antiracist and liberal-capitalist modernity became rampant after World War II in the form of state-recognized U.S. antiracism movements such as racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism. These movements influenced the formation of the state, from the period of Cold War expansionism to the period of contemporary neoliberalism by using literature as a tool for Americans to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to racial difference. The book stresses the importance of literary studies for producing, transmitting, and describing the violence of race-liberal orders that inspired the antiracism movements.

This chapter traces the mass-level story of civil rights realignment among whites. The conventional understanding is that New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism were not related among whites until the 1960s or perhaps the late 1950s. The chapter shows that among northern whites, both Democratic partisanship and economic liberalism were linked to support for the major civil rights initiatives on the agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. Although partisanship was uncorrelated with civil rights views among southern whites, economic conservatism was related to more conservative civil rights views. This connection between economic and racial conservatism in the South provided fertile ground for the GOP's eventual “southern strategy.” Ultimately, economically liberal northern Democrats provided much stronger support for most of the leading civil rights policy initiatives on the agenda than did economically conservative Republicans.

This chapter taps California’s civil rights history as a case study for recasting the disparaging view of racial liberalism presented in much of the recent "long" civil rights movement historiography. It begins by defining and linking New Deal liberalism to racial liberalism, viewing the former as an extension of, rather than break from, the latter. It then sketches the leading litigation and legislation priorities and pursuits of racial liberals in California from the 1940s through the early 1960s, arguing that many of these initiatives reflected a robust, if not radical, civil rights reform agenda on behalf of both racial and economic inequality, which the Cold War did little to disrupt or diminish. Finally, this essay make the case for viewing racial liberals as savvy, strategic, and pragmatic actors who prioritized their civil rights decision making based on a tactical sense of what was possible in particular moments and venues.

This introductory chapter illustrates the political and spatial rift between the blacks and whites in early-twentieth-century Detroit, and the ideologies that would eventually shape northern racial liberalism and the implications it holds for both sides of the racial divide. Detroit makes an ideal setting for study, as it occupies an important place in the political imagination of the United States as an extreme example of the fortunes and failures of northern industrial cities. This portrait has always had a racial cast. When the city was largely white, its working class was celebrated for its affluence; now that Detroit is majority-black, its population is maligned for its impoverishment.

The introduction argues that a tradition of liberal white race fiction has been a key component of American literary history. It surveys scholarship defining “racial liberalism” and “racial capitalism” and considers their application to literary analysis and concludes with summaries of the book’s chapters. Summarizing the common features of these novels, the introduction explains how they used a variety of literary devices, struggled to criticize racism, called for social and political change, and promoted liberal philosophies of freedom and equality. Empathy, sympathy, and an appeal to the emotions of readers are essential features of each book, moreover, for liberal race fiction imagines that changing how we feel about racial injustice will motivate us to do something about it.

This chapter examines how a a national panic over a perceived escalation in youth criminality surfaced in the early 1940s, which was triggered by the social transformations of wartime. For Chinese in the United States, the issue of juvenile delinquency became an important means through which to stipulate their race and citizenship imperatives after World War II. Chinatown leaders adopted a bifurcated strategy that reflected the ongoing tension between sameness and difference under racial liberalism. In one direction, community managers argued that juvenile delinquency was as much a problem for the Chinese as for other Americans. They stressed their right to state resources to stamp out youth crime as equal and deserving members of the polity.

This prologue outlines a variety of developments in the post-World War II era that set the stage for Part Two of our historical narrative. On the one hand, the Philippines emerged economically devastated, politically divided, and dependent on the US in new ways. The Cold War increased the strategic significance of the Philippines as an American client state and contributed to the context in which autocrat Ferdinand Marcos rose and imposed a reign of terror. On the other hand, the Second World War, the Cold War, and industrial economic expansion transformed global racial politics, catalyzing the civil rights movement in the U.S., American immigration reform, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements in the Global South, and eventual neo-liberal pro-business backlash against progressive causes that restricted the forms of justice available under racial liberalism. The geographic context of Seattle will be emphasized as a site for these contested historical developments of racial capitalist empire.

This chapter describes the formation of northern racial liberalism and of black responses to this new racial ideology. Northern racial liberalism emerged alongside the beginning of the First Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North, and subsequently developed as migration reshaped the city's housing market and racial geography. This ideology also coincided with a significant change in the city's white leadership, and is characterized by the growing power and popularity of urban reform. Urban reformers provided a language for explaining stratification and developed institutions for managing urban populations that white leaders then used, both ideologically and practically, to handle the influx of black newcomers. Finally, northern racial liberalism emerged as a response to an increasingly vocal and politically organized African American minority that was actively debating the meanings of full racial justice and challenging the racial hierarchies of the North.

Liberalism is globally triumphant, and contemporary political debates either assume a liberal framework or take it as the main target. But in these debates, the historic racialization of liberalism is rarely discussed. This chapter argues for the recognition of the “whiteness” of liberalism and political philosophy more generally, both in constructions of the canon and in the ignoring of racial justice as an issue. Correspondingly, it contends that there is a need to deracialize liberalism. The suggested strategy for accomplishing this goal is to adopt the “domination contract” as a superior “device of representation,” recover the obfuscated and sanitized past of white racial domination, and thereby expose the centrality of racial exploitation to the American polity and its implications for social justice.

Chapter One situates this entanglement in competing post-Holocaust discourses of racial expertise and Cold War geopolitics. It provides a genealogy of the 1975 United Nations resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a form of racism. Key are the scholar-activists of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center (PRC) and U.S. state agents like Daniel Patrick Moynihan articulating Cold War American exceptions.

This chapter explores the organizing victories spearheaded by black Detroiters that contributed to African Americans' increasing visibility and galvanized a local spirit of protest—an inclination toward “getting funny.” As African Americans became more assertive and confrontational in their fight for racial equality, white leaders responded by taking black concerns more seriously and addressing black demands more readily. Thus, struggles for equality and survival during the 1930s reshaped African Americans' orientation toward white city leaders, changed how those white leaders managed their relationships with African Americans, and shifted how white leaders thought about racial equality. White leaders' increasing embrace of racial liberalism was thus rooted in their responses to black residents' demands.

The introduction outlines the focus, scope, and significance of the book, introducing the Black activists, educators, parents, and students who navigated, challenged, and contributed to the urban political and educational landscape from mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles through the recent corporate reorganization of the public sphere. Black women’s political and intellectual labor powered movements for racial justice and is centered in this discussion of Black politics, social movements, and education reform. The introduction explains how the book presents a different account of Black politics and urban communities in the period after the 1960s by challenging interpretations of urban decline and “urban crisis.” It also explains the historical and contemporary importance of education as a site of struggle that reveals the boundaries of U.S. democracy and changes in the relationship between citizens and the state. The introduction outlines how historical considerations of racial liberalism, the Great Migration, the New Deal, labor, Black protest, machine politics, deindustrialization, the politics of Black achievement, desegregation, self-determination, equity, and education reform inform subsequent chapters.

The discourse on racial liberalism at mid-century involved the debate over antisemitism, made more urgent by Hitler’s rise in Germany. Born Jewish but largely assimilated, Hobson protested the complicity of liberals with antisemitism in her post–WW II best seller, which featured a gentile journalist passing for Jewish to write his expose. This novel’s reliance on a discourse of empathy ties it closely back to Stowe’s and looks forward to the philosophy at the heart of Lee’s Mockingbird. Here the protagonist, Philip Greene, passes as a Jew to learn how antisemitism feels. Meanwhile his liberal girlfriend hesitates to rent her cottage in a restricted neighborhood to Philip’s Jewish war buddy. Both protagonists exhibit the limitations of liberalism as they confront systemic as well as emotional biases that threaten their idealism.

This chapter discusses how black student activists led a campus strike at the University of Michigan (UM) in 1970, challenging entrenched ideas and practices that seemed so natural and embedded in the institution that administrators had never questioned them. The institutional values and practices that justified an admissions system that created racial disparities began in the mid-nineteenth century. Two core values emerged at the first board of regents meetings in Ann Arbor. Campus leaders wanted to create a university on par with any in the United States, and they wanted the university to offer broad access to the people of Michigan. But over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, campus leaders chose to subordinate the ideal of access to the goal of attaining and sustaining UM's elite status. In the 1940s and 1950s, administrators slowly purged official practices that mandated or accommodated segregation in campus buildings and social clubs. They slowly incorporated the prevailing ideas of racial liberalism. However, administrators never anticipated how the implementation of racial liberalism would impact black students. The ways that UM leaders crafted the model multiracial community led to a toxic racial climate at UM.

While the tensions between white hope and black despair were a dynamic that characterized politics in the Long Sixties, their structure is recursive. That is, the (positive and negative racial) feelings that undergird racial liberalism did not stop emerging and receding after law and order campaigns destroyed civil rights and Black Power organizing in the mid-70s. Nowhere is this clearer than in the entrance and disappearance of the so-called “Obama coalition” in 2008 to elect Barack Obama as the first biracial/black president in U.S. history. In considering how hope continues to be inextricably linked to rage, contempt, and despair, this brief conclusion considers hope as an ironic discourse of liberalism, particularly as it is racialized. The birth of Afro- pessimism as a coterminous discourse with what we now call the “post-racial” Obama coalition is important because it demonstrates how black feelings in the Long Sixties continue to shape national political discourse, demonstrating how affective politics are iterative as well as how they change over time.

Chapter Three interrogates how the suture between Zionism and American Jewishness was fashioned amid racial justice struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A range of Jewish writers and activists connected their orientations towards Cold War liberalism both to the intensification of U.S. state violence and to the military supremacy and existential vulnerability of the Israel after 1967.