The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations

The task is indeed urgent, for the white man’s prestige in the old sense of the word, has become greatly weakened...Well do I remember, as though it were yesterday, the impression made upon my mind when, as a young lecturer in Ancient History at Oxford, I read of the first great victory of the Japanese over the Russians. I went into my class and told them I was going to lay aside Greek history for that morning, ‘because’, I said, ‘I feel I must speak to you about the most important historical event which has happened, or is likely to happen, in our lifetime, the victory of a non-white people over a white people’.