Liberalism, Race and International Relations Theory: Garveyism, Black Nationalism and the Limits of Racial Historicism and Racial Naturalism.

The racialization of class relations and class differences in European capitalist societies was decisive in the racialization of global politics, in relation to colonialism, enslavement, imperialism and modern state formation. For David Theo Goldberg liberalism as “modernity’s definitive doctrine of self and society, of morality and politics, … served to make possible discursively, to legitimate ideologically, and to rationalize politico-economically prevailing sets of racially ordered conditions and racist exclusions … in promoting racial reasoning and its racist implications as central to modernity’s common moral, sociopolitical, and jurisprudential sense.” Keenan Malik argues that Enlightenment thinkers embraced two mutually exclusive doctrines of racial historicism (universal humanism) and racial naturalism (making biological race the source of inequality), apparently without recognizing the inconsistency. Nancy Stepan says the tendency of using “something that did not exist”â€"raceâ€"as the “starting point for proving that it did” demonstrates that “the history of racial science is a history of a series of accommodations of the sciences to deeply held convictions about the naturalness of the inequalities between human races.” Charles Mills connects the making of the Racial Contract with the production of global white supremacy as a system of power relations. I will explore issues around the role race has played in the formation of the political constitution of the modern state with reference to International Relations theory: I will examine how modern (Western) social and political thought naturalized race, culture, history, and time-space and historicized nature in theorizing about the making of the modern world. I will argue that African Diaspora contributions to International Relations discourses have differed with Western social and political thought only by degree rather than kind on the substantive issues like human nature, culture, race, power, the state, self-determination, sovereignty, subjectivity, identity and change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]