Whitewashing American Exceptionalism

• In Event: Race and U.S. Foreign Policy (Virtual Session)

Abstract

The tradition of American exceptionalism includes a sense of unique national mission that extends back beyond the Revolution to John Winthrop’s “shining city on a hill.” Yet contrary to modern rhetoric and liberal visions, the content of that mission was explicitly racialized throughout most of U.S. history. From Indian Removal policies and Black slavery to the civilizing mission in the Philippines and the World Wars, generations of U.S. leaders harbored racialized conceptions of their exceptional roles in world history. Despite its saturation of public life and political thought, however, policymakers largely purged overt racism from their rhetoric by the late twentieth century, recasting the roots of American exceptionalism in the process as rooted in a race-neutral liberal ideology. Building on the growing literature on race and foreign policy, this paper utilizes content analysis software to trace the sterilization of overt racism from U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. It goes on to test the extent to which this shift reflected a genuine ideational revolution as opposed to mere rhetorical window-dressing by examining the extent to which it was mirrored by substantive results for racial equity domestically and internationally.

Author

• Richard W. Maass, Old Dominion University