Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Goff, Brendan

Keywords

United States, Good Neighbor Policy, Race, Racism

Area of Concentration

History

Abstract

After the rhetoric of Franklin D. Roosevelt rebranded U.S. foreign relations through the anti-imperial Good Neighbor policy, challenged the racial hierarchies of "Nazi tyranny," and established post-war aims of self-determination and human rights for "all the men in all the lands," the denial of African American human rights undermined the moral legitimacy of the United States to be a model for modernity in the post-colonial world. In order to "outsell Communism" in a decolonizing world, the Truman administration embraced racial liberalism and a "Second Reconstruction" to ameliorate the image of U.S. race relations. In response to Truman‘s racial liberalism, southern Democrats revolted against the New Deal state in 1948, envisioned national political alignment through white identity politics, and thereafter welcomed eager business conservatives seeking a return to laissez faire policies. Facilitated by William F. Buckley‘s National Review publication, racial and economic conservatism converged and gained traction through "colorblind" code words such as "states‘ rights" and "law and order" which gave more respectability to white supremacy. Though devised to form a new majority, rhetorical "law and order" crystallized into the racialized War on Drugs as post-civil rights America turned from the War on Poverty to a war on the poor. Although the letter of the law may be "colorblind," the duality of federal policies which target "the young, the poor, and the black" and concomitant civil penalties that preclude drug felons from federal assistance and voting has in effect reconstructed racial caste in "post-racial America."

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