A fickle friendship: American foreign policy and civil rights reform

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Olivia Ward-Jackson examines the historic relationship between American foreign policy and civil rights reform, and wonders whether Chinese criticism of America’s race problem might be conducive to real change.

The brutal murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis has provoked uproar throughout America and the world, to the evident satisfaction of Beijing. The US protests have been extensively covered by Chinese state media in such a way as to discredit America’s reputation for upholding liberty and human rights. Scenes of civil unrest and allegations of police brutality have been particularly prominent in Chinese media. A cartoon entitled “Beneath Human Rights,” published by the People’s Daily, depicts a police officer breaking out of the Statue of Liberty whilst a man’s head lies before a blood-stained White House.

Beijing has relished the opportunity to criticise the hypocrisy of the United States in its policy towards Hong Kong. Last week, President Trump threatened to deploy federal troops to suppress demonstrations against police violence, even though his administration had openly supported the Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors last year. Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, described the protests as “Pelosi’s beautiful landscape,” in allusion to Nancy Pelosi’s suggestion last year that Hong Kong’s demonstrations were “a beautiful sight to behold”. A spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, Hua Chunying, tweeted “I can’t breathe”, the last words of George Floyd, in response to US criticism of Beijing’s heavy handling of Hong Kong. 

This is not the first time that America’s race problem has been weaponised by a foreign power. During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists exploited America’s race issue to undermine faith in its democracy. A Soviet propaganda poster juxtaposes an image of a wounded black man chained up beneath the Statue of Liberty “under capitalism” with a vibrant, multicultural society “under socialism.” The Soviet paper, Izvestia, capitalised on the apalling events at Little Rock in September, 1957, where nine African American students were prohibited from enrolling at the city’s Central High School by the Arkansas National Guard. Izvestia, reported that “behind the façade of so-called ‘American democracy,’ a tragedy is unfolding […] fascist thugs of the Ku Klux Klan are organising a savage hunt for Negro children because the latter plan to sit in the same classrooms with white boys and girls. National Guard soldiers and policemen armed to the teeth bar Negro children from entering the school”.

In her book, Cold War Civil Rights, Mary Dudziak argues that the Cold War was a catalyst for civil rights reform. During the Cold War years, racial segregation undermined the image of American democracy on the world stage and played into the hands of the Soviets. African, Asian, and Latin American nations that the United States hoped to influence were particularly offended by reports of white supremacy. Aware that racial injustice at home hampered America’s ability to contain communism and promote democracy abroad, pragmatic Cold War presidents sought to advance the civil rights agenda.

Kennedy had his eye on Cold War foreign policy rather than civil rights following his election in 1960, but soon came to realise that the two were tightly intertwined. The world watched in horror as southern whites responded viciously to civil rights activism, exposing the brutal reality of America’s democracy. In 1961, ‘Freedom Riders’ travelling on desegregated interstate buses were firebombed and attacked by mobs in Alabama; in 1962, a battle broke out in Mississippi over the enrolment of a single black man, James Meredith, at a public university; in 1963, hundreds of African American children and teenagers peacefully marching for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama were confronted with fire hoses and police dogs. In 1963, partly to salvage America’s reputation abroad as the Cold War escalated, Kennedy proposed a pivotal Civil Rights Act that would legally terminate racial segregation in the United States.

The need to secure the reputation of American democracy abroad helped to propel the civil rights agenda during the Cold War. However, once this had been accomplished, civil rights reform lost momentum, as it ceased to be a pressing foreign policy issue. Kennedy’s successor, President Johnson, accorded African Americans full equality before the law through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, under huge pressure both at home and abroad. Satisfied, the international community turned their attention away from America’s civil rights movement and towards the war in Vietnam, just at the critical moment when an anti-civil rights backlash swept over the United States. By 1968, Johnson lacked the political mandate to act on the Kerner Commission, which proposed extensive reforms to address the problem of institutional racism that denied real equality to African Americans.

Racial injustice has always been the Achilles heel of American democracy, and it is one that China will likely try to exploit, if the rift between the two powers continues to widen. Whilst all impetus for change is good, America should be wary that foreign policy does not become a fickle friend to civil rights reform, as it did during the Cold War. The US government needs to rigorously uproot institutionalised racism for justice’s sake, and beware of passing piecemeal reforms intended to placate an international audience.

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