Race and Racism in President’s Daily Briefs (1961-1977)

• In Event: Race and Racism in Foreign Policy

Abstract

The President’s Daily Brief (PDB) has provided daily summaries on national security intelligence to presidents since 1961. We analyze a corpus of declassified PDBs that span four presidencies (1961-1977) to assess an underexplored aspect of US foreign policy decision making: race. We assess the use of racialized language and racial stereotypes in these intelligence documents as a lens into the role of race in foreign policy decisions has evolved and transformed after World War II and into the Cold War. We argue that raced modes of expression and thinking appear in both explicit and implicit terminology and assess this claim using quantitative and qualitative text analysis methods. We assess trends in explicitly racialized terminology in PDB items over time, finding evidence of changing language norms for referring to Black communities and peoples (i.e. transitioning from using “negro” to “black“). We also find implicit racial stereotypes appear in two distinct forms: (1) leaders from the Global South are described as more emotional and hence less rational than Western counterparts; and (2) colloquial language is used more often to describe leaders from the Global South reflecting lower perceived status. Overall, we find evidence of the pervasive influence of racial thinking in intelligence materials specifically designed for, and delivered daily to, the U.S. president.

Authors

• Maya Van Nuys, University of Chicago

• Austin Carson, University of Chicago

• Eric Min, UCLA