Mainstream International Relations (IR) is witnessing a resurgence of race scholarship. This work has primarily focused on how racial discrimination causes racially disparate outcomes in areas like alliance formation, colonial violence, and wartime deaths (Búzás Reference Búzás2013; Huff et al. Reference Huff, Min and Schub2025; MacDonald Reference MacDonald2023). This scholarship corrects IR’s longstanding marginalization of race and ethnic politics and holds contemporary relevance given the second Trump administration’s embrace of xenophobic policies and their threat to kill a “whole civilization” during the war with Iran (Rogers Reference Rogers2026). This work has emerged alongside a broader rejection of canonical IR texts because of their eurocentrism, racialized concepts and logics, and their whitewashed views of international politics (Hobson Reference Hobson2012). The reconsideration of the canon has created space to think about race and international politics through alternative theorists who have explored the nature of racism.Footnote 1
In this article, I return to the Howard School’s Merze Tate (1905–1996). Tate, the first black woman to obtain a PhD in government from Harvard’s Radcliffe College, has recently returned to academic renown. Her name graces the International Studies Association’s award for best article in historical IR and the American Political Science Association’s awards for best book and IR dissertation.Footnote 2 Through a close reading of her scholarship between 1938 and 1948, I develop Tate’s implicit structural theory of power politics and racial equality. I argue that Tate saw global racial hierarchy as contingent on an unequal distribution of military capabilities that enabled the “white nations” to exploit and subjugate the “darker peoples” (Reference Tate1943a). Writing during World War II, Tate did not believe that the United States and the European empires would voluntarily create a just postwar settlement for the racially oppressed absent the threat of racialized violence. In her view, overturning this structural relationship required a more equal balance of power. Her structural materialist argument enabled Tate to view race war as an act loaded with emancipatory potential. In sum, Tate treated balance of power politics as a structural solution to racial hierarchy.
This article makes three main contributions. First, this study advances our understanding of racism and international politics. One prominent approach is to treat race and racism as unit-level variables. This entails identifying the causal power that racial identities and prejudices have on some outcome of interest. Characteristics here are questions like, “What type of foreign policies do racist actors pursue?”; “Are foreign policy elites equally susceptible to racial biases?”; “Do we see discord among racially different agents and cooperation among racially similar agents?” (Búzás Reference Búzás2013, 585; Freeman et al. Reference Freeman, Kim and Lake2022, 189; Rathbun and Rathbun Reference Rathbun and Rathbun2023, 775). These questions tend to be answered through reference to theories of social psychology. The second primary approach is constitutive and examines the racialized nature of the modern international system and the racial orders within it. Work in this vein is motivated by analyzing how racial hierarchies are maintained, perpetuated, and embedded in our ways of knowing and being in the world. That includes investigating how liberal norms privilege Western epistemologies and practices to the detriment of those who are marginalized within the West or are positioned outside of it (Brown Reference Brown2024a; Gani Reference Gani2017; Rutazibwa Reference Rutazibwa2016; Sabaratnam Reference Sabaratnam2017; Vucetic Reference Vucetic2013).
There is an emerging third approach interested in explaining racial outcomes from a social structural causal perspective. Amoz Hor (Reference Hor2023) and Bianca Freeman (Reference Freeman2023) show how white supremacist racial hierarchies affect interstate cooperation across racial lines. In previous work, I have argued that geopolitical competition led to the inclusion of nonwhite states in elite international clubs populated by the United States and European states (Bustamante Reference Bustamante2024a). These works contribute to a positivist race in IR research agenda by centering the role of power, broadly defined, in shaping racialization processes and racialized outcomes (Freeman Reference Freeman2024; Maass Reference Maass2023). The appreciation of power problematizes our understanding of the nature of race, how racial inequality is maintained, and the ends met by racist systems and structures (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva1996; Fields and Fields Reference Fields and Fields2014; Ray Reference Ray2019). This approach promises to combine theoretical flexibility with empirical rigor. These kinds of explanations move beyond individual actors and focus instead on the ideological, normative, and legal structures in which these actors operate and how those structures affect behavior. In focusing on the structures, one is able to ask a different set of research questions like how racial prejudices emerge while also being able to use different types of evidence that do not rely on showing an actor’s racist intentions (Blumer Reference Blumer1958). Using an analytical lens with a wider aperture allows scholars to consider how unit-level racial factors arise and the conditions under which they affect outcomes or not (Bustamante Reference Bustamante2024b, 755–756). Additionally, relaxing the standard for evidence of racist intentions is more amenable to studying race and racism in a world where there is a formal norm of racial equality (Búzás Reference Búzás2021).
I contend that Tate’s structural approach contributes to this agenda. Tate offers a unique perspective in centering the role of military power in our understanding of racism in the international system. For Tate, superior military capabilities enabled European rule and white supremacy while a shift in military power could overturn this state of affairs. Her “realist” approach centered the political dynamics of the international system, and she treated the international domain as a site of struggle among states seeking to advance their interests through the force of arms. She rejected the possibility of racial equality in the absence of a structural shift in military capabilities favorable to the colonized and racially oppressed. Such a shift would culminate in a race war unless there was a respect for the new balance of power. Indeed, her focus on power politics made her skeptical that international institutions could advance racial equality. She saw those institutions as useless at best and, at worst, as entrenching racial domination. As I show below, Tate’s realist take on race war focused on its potential emancipatory implications rather than the possibility of racial retrenchment (Barder Reference Barder2021). With existing literature focusing on transnational coalitions (Búzás Reference Búzás2021), decolonial internationalism (Getachew Reference Getachew2019), and the power of racial equality norms (Klotz Reference Klotz1995a; Reference Klotz1995b), Tate’s approach forces us to reckon with military power and the role of violence in the struggle for racial equality.
Second, this article expands our knowledge of the Howard School’s approach to IR theory. The Howard School moniker refers to a group composed primarily of black male intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Ralph Bunche who worked at Howard University in the early and mid-twentieth century and critiqued domestic and international forms of racial hierarchy (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015). Tate stands out as the lone woman of the group. Unsurprisingly, much of the research on the Howard School has focused on what the men have written (Henderson Reference Henderson2017; Mampilly Reference Mampilly2022). In contrast, there is a burgeoning scholarship that has increasingly focused on the transnational activism and international writings of black women (Bay et al. Reference Bay, Griffin, Jones and Savage2015; Blain Reference Blain2018; Cooper Reference Cooper2017; Dunstan and Owens Reference Dunstan and Owens2022; Umoren Reference Umoren2018). This includes women like Eslanda Robeson and Claudia Jones who worked as activist-intellectuals and whose writings were grounded in praxis and their understandings of race, class, and gender (Dunstan and Owens Reference Dunstan and Owens2022, 567). Tate’s relative obscurity compared to her Howard School colleagues is in no small part a consequence of the sexism that she faced during her professional career and the gendered exclusions that have shaped the craft of intellectual history (Bay et al. Reference Bay, Griffin, Jones and Savage2015; Savage Reference Savage, Owens and Rietzler2021, 267). The marginalization and exclusion of black women have warped our understanding of international politics and how we teach it (Colgan Reference Colgan2017).
By centering Tate, I demonstrate how her contributions were both similar to and distinct from her Howard School and realist contemporaries. Her realist arguments were cogent, clear, and convincing with no less a realist than Hans Morgenthau appreciating how Tate articulated the causes of war and the limits of arbitration in ways that he had tried to “for almost fifteen years” (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015, 162). Her attention to race and imperialism fit easily with how Du Bois and Locke approached the issue, and her appreciation of political struggle made her a kindred spirit to a fellow realist like E.H. Carr. What separated her from these men was her combination of all these factors. As I show below, Tate’s appreciation of state egoism steered her away from the color consciousness that brought Du Bois to serve as an apologist for Japanese imperialism while avoiding the eurocentrism prevalent in Carr’s writings (Getachew and Pitts Reference Getachew and Pitts2022, XVI–XVII; Tate Reference Tate1943a, 523). Indeed, it is difficult to disagree with the claim that Tate’s understanding of international politics was informed by her “personal experiences of racial and gender inequality in professional and domestic relations as a Black American female scholar…in the age of imperialism and colonialism” (Lu in Hutchings et al. Reference Hutchings, Dunstan, Owens, Rietzler, Phillips, Lu, Finlay and Ramgotra2022, 126). This makes Tate an interesting thinker with appeal across different IR theory camps.
Third, this article contributes to the renewed interdisciplinary appreciation of Tate. This respect is a testament to Tate’s career as an academic trailblazer whose work was deemed required reading at Princeton, Yale, and the Department of Defense (Savage Reference Savage, Bay, Griffin, Jones and Savage2015, 264; Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015, 164). Robert Vitalis and Barbara Savage can be credited with recovering Tate from obscurity. Vitalis first brought Tate to our collective attention with his intellectual history of the Howard School where he outlined the broad contours of her thought. He portrayed Tate as a determined woman who overcame sexism and racism both at Howard and in academia more broadly (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015). His history offers a largely descriptive account of Tate’s scholarship and gives a general sense of the common themes throughout her long career. While Vitalis captures the range of Tate’s thoughts, he does not offer a close examination of the theoretical linkages that connect her disarmament books with her critiques of empire and racial hierarchy. I believe this leads Vitalis to a mistaken reading of Tate’s conception of race war as stemming from her belief in “color consciousness” (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015, 127). A closer read shows that color consciousness did not factor in her vision of race war. Instead, her argument flowed logically from her structural argument where actors prioritized their security.
Savage, Tate’s biographer, is better on this count when she points out that Tate’s “lifetime of scholarship…is tethered theoretically” to an “anti-racist geopolitics” (Reference Savage2023, 4, 83, 95, 137, 213; Reference Savage, Owens and Rietzler2021, 277, 280, 284). This is a useful way to capture the main features of Tate’s thought like her comparative analysis of racism and her treatment of technology and imperialism (Savage Reference Savage2023, 95, 102, 139). Strikingly, Savage omits virtually all discussion of Vitalis’s work in her book and two articles on Tate except to argue that neither the Howard School moniker nor any other “political label or discipline” can adequately capture Tate’s “work and ideas” (Savage Reference Savage, Owens and Rietzler2021, 276). Unfortunately, this means that Savage does not engage with Vitalis’s reading of race war. The phrase “race war” never appears in Savage’s writings despite the centrality of the idea to Tate’s critique.
This article proceeds in five sections. The first situates the project within existing epistemological debates on structural theory in IR and the value of a realist approach to racism in international politics. The second section develops Tate’s structural argument through a close reading of her articles, books, and reviews published in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 3 The third section compares and contrasts Tate’s arguments with contemporary writings by Du Bois, Locke, and Carr. The fourth section suggests the contemporary purchase of Tate’s arguments. The final section summarizes.
Raced Agents and Raced Structures
At the most basic level, a social structural causal explanation explains outcomes via reference to how an actor’s behavior is shaped by their position in relation to others (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2016). One’s position comes with certain incentives and constraints to behave in certain ways rather than others. My position as an instructor incentivizes me to teach students while dissuading me from spending my time scrolling through social media if I want to keep earning my salary. The position of my students incentivizes them to pay attention to succeed in my class though there are fewer immediate costs if they decide to scroll through social media instead.
The dominant way that IR thinks about social structural causal explanations comes from Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics published in 1979 (Parent Reference Parent2024, 729). Waltz contended that the ordering principle of the international system is “anarchy,” understood as the absence of a supranational authority rather than chaos and disorder (Reference Waltz1979, 102). From this basic principle, Waltz argued that states had to rely on their military power to defend and pursue their national interests. These interests varied, but Waltz maintained that anarchy incentivized states to prioritize security since only then could they avoid being conquered and be able to pursue the rest of their interests (Reference Waltz1979, 126). As such, the structure of the international system was composed of the distribution of military capabilities. Different concentrations of military power led to different outcomes with systemic implications like the possibility of major power war (Reference Waltz1979, 162). To make his structural argument, Waltz intentionally omitted ideational and unit-level factors that focused on domestic state characteristics like culture and leaders (Reference Waltz1979, 82). Waltz’s “neorealist” theory is considered part of a supposedly longstanding realist tradition dating back to Thucydides and Machiavelli. Neorealism is a refinement and extension of the classical realism practiced by Carr, Morgenthau, and Tate. The mark of this realist tradition is the emphasis on how polities rely on their arms to survive in the absence of a supranational authority like a world government. The distinctive feature of neorealism is its parochial emphasis on material structure while classical realists cared about structure and kept a healthy appreciation of other factors albeit their theories were less systematic (Kirshner Reference Kirshner2022; Parent and Baron Reference Parent and Baron2011, 13).
There has been no shortage of criticism against realist arguments. Relevant here are social constructivist critiques which challenge the deterministic nature of realism (Weldes Reference Weldes1996, 278; Wendt Reference Wendt1999, 186). These critiques problematize that which realists take as fixed like their notions of national interests, state identity, and conception of international structure (Finnemore Reference Finnemore1996; Klotz Reference Klotz1995a). Tying these critiques together is their commitment to centering the social nature of international politics which realism sets aside in favor of privileging material factors like economic and military power. Indeed, it is the downplaying, if not outright exclusion, of ideational factors that have led scholars to criticize realism as being part of the reason why IR scholars did not study racism for decades (Bustamante Reference Bustamante2024b, 748–749).
These are powerful critiques that merit justifying the utility of a realist take on race IR scholarship. To do so, it is necessary to first lay out my conceptual understanding of race and racism. I conceptualize race as a structural relation between groups of people with unequal social standing who are classified as belonging to distinct “races” because of perceived biological differences (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva1996). Over the last half millennium, the importance of biological difference has been backed by the weight of religious or scientific authority which continues to persist in the 21st century. Unequal standing among the groups is marked by differentially distributed rights, privileges, status, and access to wealth (Du Bois Reference Du Bois2018, 33). Racism can be adequately conceptualized as the unequal distribution of these items with consequences for the life-chances of the group members (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2007, 28). Conceptualizing race and racism in this manner centers the question of power in a broad sense. It treats race as a group identity that is grounded in more than perceived corporeal differences while treating racism as the existence and maintenance of social and material inequalities between racialized peoples (Cox Reference Cox1945, 143; Shilliam and Spence Reference Shilliam and Spence2025, 203).
In this article, I refer to this line of work as a structural causal approach to race in IR. It locates causes in durable relations of hierarchy and recognition that allocate resources and standing across racialized groups and thereby structure actors’ incentives, constraints, and institutional access. It is “structural” because it explains outcomes by reference to these relational positions, and it is “causal” because it specifies mechanisms and observable implications about when shifts in position, whether material or symbolic, alter behavior and outcomes.
Conceptualizing race in structural terms also helps clarify what distinctively structural causal explanations add. Structural accounts do not require demonstrating that particular decision makers harbored racist intent. Instead, they specify how hierarchy, exclusion, and differential recognition shape the opportunities available to actors and systematically generate racialized outcomes. In recent years, causal explanations of race and racism in international politics have largely been cast at the unit-level. This has consisted largely of an interpersonal approach that conceptualizes racism as a set of prejudices or biases among elites and the public (Carson et al. Reference Carson, Min and Nuys2024; Mercer Reference Mercer2023). Racial attitudes affect the degree of animosity and altruism that elites and publics display toward others (Chu and Lee Reference Chu and Lee2023; Evers and Schaff Reference Evers and Schaaf2024). Influenced by social psychology research, this literature demonstrates the microfoundations of how racism affects support for hawkish policies (Kim Reference Kim2024). This research has allowed scholars to begin debating how racial inequalities are perpetuated and challenged in the international system.
A structural approach is useful alongside unit-level accounts because it can explain patterned racialized outcomes even when individual attitudes are difficult to observe or not widely held. Such approaches center the structural nature of racism as a “broad” hierarchy that “produces both the actors (or at least their worldview) and the space of world politics in which they act” or consider race relationally as a form of status competition between groups (Pampinella Reference Pampinella2021; Zarakol Reference Zarakol and Zarakol2017, 7). The former prompts a focus on how structural transformations in the international system shape a state’s prospects for prosperity and recognition. For instance, with decolonization came a shift in institutional power in the United Nations as African, Asian, and Caribbean countries joined the organization. With their inclusion, “developing countries in the [United Nations General Assembly] had a majority to pass anticolonial measures” like the New International Economic Order which sought “economic redistribution” and “the redistribution of political power” (Viola Reference Viola2020, 195, 197). Similarly, after decades of being excluded, the PRC was able to join the United Nations in part because a critical mass of newly decolonized African states voted for China’s inclusion (Foot Reference Foot1995, 35–36). The latter prioritizes power over prejudice and focuses on the material and symbolic positions that racialized groups occupy (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva1996; Shilliam and Spence Reference Shilliam and Spence2025). Understanding the interpersonal dynamics that uphold racism requires factoring in the contexts that give rise to racial prejudice in the first place (Blumer Reference Blumer1958).
The advantage of these structural approaches is not that they displace unit-level accounts. It is that they specify the conditions under which unit-level racial attitudes become politically salient and the mechanisms through which those attitudes are reproduced. Put differently, prejudice explanations can identify proximate causes of specific decisions while structural explanations are better suited to account for patterned outcomes across cases. In a recent study, Phillip Lipscy and Jiajia Zhou (Reference Lipscy and Zhou2026) show racial disparities in the membership of international organizations over the last two centuries despite shifting norms of racial equality. Structural accounts also widen the evidentiary basis for causal claims by allowing scholars to rely less on attitudinal measures and more on how institutional rules, distributions of recognition, and shifts in material and symbolic standing systematically alter incentives and outcomes that are more or less favorable for the cause of racial equality.
This brings us to the central tension at the heart of this paper: Can a realist focus contribute to structural explanations of race without relegating race to a secondary concern? On the surface, realist accounts seem ill-equipped since they treat material capabilities as analytically sufficient and impose meanings onto “state interests” rather than ask how those interests are constituted through racialized understandings of international politics (Barder Reference Barder2021; Klotz Reference Klotz1995a). This is a serious challenge given that officials often mobilize xenophobic and racialized rhetoric to define threats, justify coercion, and frame the defense of “the national interest” as necessary to avoid a descent into the “fundamental anarchy of international politics” (Barder Reference Barder2021, 5–6; Brown Reference Brown2024b, 194). One would be justified in relying on a constructivist account that emphasizes how global racial ideas and norms shape interests and behavior (Klotz Reference Klotz1995a; Thompson Reference Thompson2013).
The argument developed in the rest of this article is that Tate helps bridge this divide. Her classical realism centers power without treating it as race-neutral. Tate theorizes power and racial hierarchy as mutually reinforcing: coercive dominance enables imperial rule, imperial rule stabilizes racial hierarchy, and racial hierarchy shapes how empires interpret threats, define interests, and design institutions. On Tate’s account, race is not a residual explanation invoked only when race-neutral power politics is insufficient. Rather, racial hierarchy structures the meaning and convertibility of power by shaping who is recognized as civilized, sovereign, and eligible for equal standing and by influencing which security claims are treated as legitimate. This is a feedback process in which military domination produces a social-psychological investment in white supremacy which then shapes how empires understand their interests. In this sense, a realist power structure and a raced status hierarchy operate simultaneously, with each reinforcing the other. Tate’s innovation is that she theorizes this interplay as opposed to treating them separately.
This perspective also clarifies what separates Tate from Waltz. The difference is less their shared emphasis on military power or their appreciation of a decentralized international system than the outcomes they sought to explain and the international realities that oriented their theorizing. For Tate, the motivating puzzles were disarmament, the League’s failure to protect Ethiopia, and the requirements of a durable settlement after World War II (Savage Reference Savage2023, 59, 83). For Waltz, they were the recurrence of balances of power, the irrationality of fighting in Vietnam, and the need for abstract theorizing in IR (Reference Waltz1979, 119, 191). Yet over time, the discipline increasingly treated international politics as something that could be analyzed in a vacuum devoid of race. This arguably has less to do with the theoretical tools at hand than the politics of knowledge production (Maass and Shilliam Reference Maass and Shilliam2025). Indeed, as Tate later described her approach, “I don’t let race warp my point of view. If I find race relevant to my writings, I don’t hide it. But I don’t blow it up either” (Savage Reference Savage2023, 187, 208).
Structure, Disarmament, and Race War
The previous section laid out the importance of a social structural causal explanation and situated Tate within a broader realist tradition. Here I lay out Tate’s realist explanation of disarmament failure and then show how it shaped her understanding of the prospect and promise of race war.
Disarmament Failure
Tate cut her academic teeth on disarmament. Her Bachelor of Letters (B. Litt) thesis at Oxford, doctoral dissertation at Harvard, and her first two books were on the causes of disarmament failure.Footnote 4 Tate made the same argument in each of these works: Disarmament efforts failed because there was no “international state,” “international executive,” or “world police” that could force states to be satisfied with their “relative” positions and comply with a disarmament treaty (Tate Reference Tate1942, 65, 347; Reference Tate1948, 9–12). The lack of a world government made disarmament, understood as a limitation and reduction of arms, an “idle dream” that was “impossible” to accomplish so long as states valued their sovereignty and pursued their national interests (Tate Reference Tate1948, xi, 83).
What were these national interests? Tate identified two core motivations: “security” and “colonial aspirations” (Reference Tate1942, x, 148; Reference Tate1948, 19, 80, 83, 86, 116, 145, 254, 274). These twin factors caused disarmament failure because they relied on states having a favorable “distribution of power, territory, wealth and resources” so they could feel “secure” and keep their colonies from “seizure” (Tate Reference Tate1942, 22, 351, 356). Tate made her argument in systemic terms since every “great power” needed arms to protect themselves and their colonies from internal rebellions and from predatory peers. Tate argued that the First Hague Conference (1899) failed to advance disarmament because states were unwilling to negotiate anything that could put their “life” at risk. She found this behavior entirely “justified” (Reference Tate1942, 247, 289; Reference Tate1948, 20–22). At the same time, she blamed American, British, French, German, Italian, and Russian colonial pursuits for ruining disarmament dreams. Imperial conflicts shortly before and after the conference caused armament spending to jump “by leaps and bounds” and pushed disarmament further away (Savage Reference Savage, Owens and Rietzler2021, 273–274; Tate Reference Tate1942, 351, 353; Reference Tate1948, 47, 117). Savage sums up Tate’s views nicely, “neither the strong nor the weak had sufficient incentive to commit to limiting or reducing military capability, and least of all those who had or desired empires and colonies” (Reference Savage, Owens and Rietzler2021, 273).
Tate’s account is deceptively elegant. The absence of a world government meant states always had to compete and look after their own security and colonial interests. Stopgap measures like the League of Nations faltered in the face of such egoism. No state would risk arbitrating its “existence” unless compelled by some supranational force (Tate Reference Tate1942, 80; Reference Tate1948, 12, 23). Looking more closely reveals a theoretical tension. Security concerns made disarmament impossible while colonial ambitions pushed disarmament further out of reach. The obvious resolution is to argue that the imperial metropoles viewed colonies as valuable sites to extract resources, manpower, and maintain access to non-European markets.Footnote 5 Tate gestures towards this answer when she claims that “economic imperialism encouraged this competition” but does not fully commit to it (Reference Tate1942, 351). Indeed, the use of the word “encouraged” is telling here since it suggests that colonial ambitions exacerbated great power competition as opposed to being a primary cause. Tate makes the separation more cleanly when she writes how the search for “security” between Germany, Japan, and Italy in the interwar period “endangered the peace of the world even more than did the imperialism of those powers of the nineteenth-century which believed that expansion was the ‘white man’s burden’, the ‘mission civilisatrice’, or ‘manifest destiny’” (Reference Tate1948, 265). It is this equivocation that brought Du Bois to critique Tate’s first book as failing to appreciate that the “economic reason which underlay colonial imperialism” was the true cause of great power competition (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1943, 190–191). As victims of circumstance, Tate was not above showing sympathy for the security situation that states found themselves in:
There is no security for any state unless it be a security in which all its neighbors share. No great powers seriously considered limiting its armaments; no one nation was exclusively responsible for the competition in armaments; but the failure to check the intense armament rivalry made war inevitable (Reference Tate1942, xi).
Tate repeats this sentiment again later in her first book:
No one nation was exclusively responsible for the competition in armaments; none was innocent, for they all lived in a perpetual state of mutual fear and antagonism, expecting war and always preparing for it. If none was innocent, therefore, they were all more or less guilty. Finally, the failure of the powers to check the intense armament rivalry made war inevitable (Reference Tate1942, 347).
Why the equivocation? One way to understand it is as a conflict between Tate’s theoretical inclinations and her personal sentiments. She wanted to explain the causes of disarmament failure without absolving the empires of their actions. Squaring that circle meant keeping security and colonialism analytically separate from one another. Reducing the latter to the former would have entailed excusing empire. But there is no equivalent expression of sympathy for such actions. This makes sense because Tate was an anti-imperialist. As Savage argues, Tate’s time at Oxford, her worldly travels, and her experiences with racism and sexism formed her “understanding of the world” and were central to her conceptualization of international politics (Reference Savage, Owens and Rietzler2021, 284–285). She never expresses a hint of sympathy that the spread of European civilization was beneficial for other peoples or for the imperial constraints the empires found themselves in.
Race and Disarmament Failure
How did Tate think about the role of racialized unit-level factors and disarmament? She offers only a few scattered, but telling, remarks. As noted above, Tate saw racial ideologies as destabilizing but less so than security competition. In terms of racial identity, she argued that it played a negligible role in her only example of a successful disarmament treaty. Tate viewed cooperation between Great Britain and the United States on the Rush-Bagot Agreement (1817) as facilitated more by their lack of clashing “national interests” than because of their shared language and culture. She reiterated this argument in her analysis of the interwar naval conferences. Cooperation between Great Britain and the United States occurred because there was no real major conflict of interest rather than because of their shared identity as “English-speaking peoples” (Tate Reference Tate1942, 27; Reference Tate1948, 34, 157–160, 173–174, 184, 193, 255, 259–260). The closest that Tate gets to making an argument about the importance of race at the unit-level is by equating Japan’s “demand for racial equality” in the League of Nations’ Covenant with their “insistence on naval equality” during the naval conferences (Reference Tate1948, 186). Race mattered, but it did not matter more than other security concerns.
Racial Equality and the Specter of Race War
In the previous section, I showed how Tate developed a structural explanation for disarmament failure. Her structural argument was grounded in the distribution of military capabilities and state egoism. In this section, I show how her emphasis on structure led Tate to view race war as a route to racial equality.
Writing during World War II, Tate worried about the eventual postwar settlement. She believed that the World War I settlement failed because the great powers preferred to protect their empires rather than uphold the League of Nations’ promise of collective security. Their unwillingness to risk the “collapse” of their empires allowed the invasions of Ethiopia, Manchuria, and Czechoslovakia that were considered “too black,” “too yellow,” and “too mixed” to be worth defending. The failure of the League, “that great white hope,” to protect the vulnerable left it a “sham” (Tate Reference Tate1939, 14–16; Reference Tate1943a, 521–522). Tate’s scathing critique called attention to what she feared would be the weaknesses in the next postwar settlement. She had no doubt that the imperial powers would resist any plan that harmed their rule; sarcastically musing as to whether the French would “collaborate with the United Nations if they thought there would be no North African Empire after” the war (Reference Tate1943a, 523). Tate forcefully made the point:
World War II, when considered realistically, is not fought for the Four Freedom everywhere. It is a militarist and imperialist struggle for freedom and power—power for some at the expense of others. The Eight Points of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms may have been intended to serve as idealistic platitudes for Europe but we cannot foresee their voluntary application to areas outside that continent (Reference Tate1943a, 523).
Tate’s realist skepticism colored her reading of postwar proposals calling for trusteeship. These proposals were akin to the League’s mandate system which designated former colonies as mandates and placed them largely under the care of France, Britain, and Japan. The mandated powers were formally tasked with preparing their mandates for self-government but, in reality, trusteeship simply served as cover for further exploitation. Tate readily pointed this out by noting how the imperialist powers upheld the “master–servant relationship” throughout the world with violent acts of “public floggings…machine-gunning mobs…[and] barbaric lynching” (Reference Tate1943a, 525, 528–529). This occurred even when there was no economic competition between “white laborers” and indigenous people as in the Solomon Islands. This senseless brutality made it senseless to implement a new trusteeship system. There was no possibility that the subjugated would accept the “white man’s exalted view of trusteeship” because they knew what would happen if they did. They would not accept anything that denied them freedom from foreign rule (Tate Reference Tate1943a, 521–522).
She grounded her argument in what she saw were changes in the distribution of power. Europe was “slaughtering” itself. The “colored races” had become “familiar” with the “white man’s culture” and his “guns.” Japan’s battlefield victories had ended “white” control over the “Eastern races.” The demise of white supremacy had come from within because of how the inclusion of colonial subjects into the “wars and revolutions of the ruling nations” had socialized them into modern military practices. There was no longer reason to fear “the white man” since now the rest of the world knew that “they themselves are power” (Tate Reference Tate1943a, 522, 528, 532). The confluence of all these factors combined with the failure to live up to democratic ideas led the “white man” to be “challenged and dangerously outnumbered by the world of color” (Reference Tate1943b, 654).
The shifts in the distribution of power created a potentially explosive situation. Either racial dominance would continue to reign or it would give way to a more racially egalitarian international system. Tate asked the question in blunt terms, “Will the white man and the colored man now find a basis for cooperation as equals?” Failure to embrace equality would lead to “race war” (Reference Tate1943a, 523). This war would be unprecedented. It would be an “inter-continental war between the East and West, the greatest war the human race has ever seen, a war between whites and non-whites” (Reference Tate1943a, 531). The choice was clear. The “white man” could choose to “undo his ghastly handiwork” or be forced to undo it (Reference Tate1943b, 655). She cited Oswald Spengler and his theory on civilizational decline and how “past great cultures” have all fallen at the hands of “the hopeless downtrodden races” living on their periphery. Tate warned about how the “Yellow-Brown-Black-Red menace lurks within the field of the white power” and how the “day of equal peoples is at hand” (Reference Tate1943a, 532). All of this was a result of the “dark peoples” observing and participating in modern military practices spearheaded by the “white peoples.”
Through these writings, we can clearly see how Tate understood the relationship between the distribution of power and racial hierarchy. A favorable distribution enabled European domination while institutions like the League of Nations gave cover for their rule over new territories. The oppressed had no recourse to equality and freedom except through the force of arms. World War II created conducive conditions for a shift in the distribution of power as the European empires weakened each other, Japan loosened Europe’s grip in the Pacific, and the colonized became increasingly armed and familiar with modern warfare. Tate’s recognition of these dynamics led her to view race war with emancipatory potential that could be avoided only if “Great Britain and the United States” followed through with applying the ideals of the Atlantic Charter to the rest of the world which includes the right to self-government, free trade, sovereignty, and freedom from territorial aggression (Tate Reference Tate1943a, 526, 531).
Tate’s notion of race war is subversive and inverts traditional American understandings of race war. Alexander Barder traces the stark anxiety that American and European writers express over the threat of “enemy races” against the “decadent West” from the mid-19th century through the present (Reference Barder2021, 63, 68). Barder shows how a sense of incommensurability among races is prevalent in the white supremacist writings of Lothrop Stoddard and civilizational writings of contemporary scholars like Samuel Huntington and Anthony Pagden (Reference Barder2021, 187, 208). The alarmism over a coming race war emerges out of the belief that a “genuinely postcolonial world, a world where human life is valued beyond the privilege of male whiteness, is a world of nothingness” (Barder Reference Barder2021, 236). A chasm separates these arguments from Tate’s. Her predictions of race war are grounded in the possibility of commensurability and avoidance. The global race war could be avoided through an abandonment of the “traditional belief in the necessity for the white man to be supreme” and accepting the principle of racial equality (Tate Reference Tate1943a, 531). There is no sense of inevitability but rather a respect for armed peace. Putting a twist on Du Bois’s famous statement on the color line, Tate claims that the “problem of the twentieth century is not disarmament to assure peace but co-armament to maintain peace” (Tate Reference Tate1948, 11).
Looking back, one is right to wonder how and why the global race war was avoided. Several explanations are plausible. First, decolonization was a staggered process that occurred in waves. Some colonies gained independence relatively quickly after the defeat of the Axis powers since the empires realized that they would not be able to reestablish control as with British rule over India. Rather than a global race war, there were a series of scattered racialized conflicts that stretched out over time. During the 1970s, Cuban leader Fidel Castro sent troops to Angola in support of “the most beautiful cause,” namely, the struggle against apartheid in Southern Africa (Gleijeses Reference Gleijeses2013, 30). Second, there was a formal normative change in the “conceptual underpinnings of the [postwar] international order” as the newly independent states were able to articulate their views on global platforms like the United Nations and the institutions themselves deemed explicit forms of racism and colonialism normatively inappropriate (Jansen and Osterhammel Reference Jansen and Osterhammel2017, 154–155). Third, the superpowers and the European empires were at times successful in installing and propping up friendly leaders in the newly independent states as when the United States and Britain aided the overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953.
Tate and Her Contemporaries
The previous section laid out Tate’s structural argument and her approach to race war. This section situates Tate’s writings alongside the prominent classical realist Carr and her Howard School members Du Bois and Locke. Placing Tate in the context of these other writers is useful in accomplishing two aims. First, as mentioned above, the ultimate purpose of this paper is for scholars to treat Tate as a scholar whose writings are relevant to general discussions and debates on IR theory. This is best facilitated by comparing Tate to Carr the realist and her Howard School mates in order to show the diversity and range of her insights. Second, this comparison is useful in demonstrating what aspects of Tate’s arguments were common and unique at the time. This is particularly useful in showing the value gained by reading and engaging with Tate. As I show, Tate’s combined attention to race and to the distribution of military power set her apart from these men. Space constraints limit a full-blown engagement but I leverage this opportunity to suggest key similarities and differences. Future research should continue this comparative reading since, to my knowledge, this is the first article to read Tate in relation to these other authors.
The connections between Tate, Du Bois, and Locke are both personal and intellectual. Personally, both Locke and Tate attended Oxford and Tate prided herself on beating Locke out as the ‘first colored American’ to earn a graduate degree from there (Savage Reference Savage2023, 75). With Du Bois, Tate held him in esteem and asked him to review her first book which he subsequently did (Savage Reference Savage2023, 94). With Carr, she agreed with his views on the negligibility of public opinion and criticized his settlement proposal for World War II (Tate Reference Tate1942, 161; Reference Tate1943a, 523).
Intellectually, there are three main points of difference between Tate and Du Bois in the 1930s and 1940s. The first point of difference, as suggested in Du Bois’s book review, comes from how they thought about domestic and international factors. Du Bois criticized Tate for neglecting the importance of mass publics as a force for peace. He argued that “the day” that mass publics understand the nature of European imperialism in Africa and Asia will also be the day when “wars will cease” (Reference Du Bois1943, 191). In contrast, Tate had no hope in public opinion. She argued that mass publics “were perfectly convinced of the hideousness of war, they found armaments a heavy burden” but still it “did not occur to them” that their efforts could lead to disarmament. Public opinion “did not exert a great influence upon governments” when it came to pursuing disarmament negotiations in the late-19th century. Instead, what drove state leaders to consider disarmament was their ballooning military budgets and their fear over the “terrible hazards of modern war.” She singles out Tsar Nicholas, “who least of all considered public opinion,” as spearheading disarmament negotiations for political, economic, and strategic reasons (Tate Reference Tate1943a, 162–163). Again, we see how Tate’s attention to international pressures led her to dismiss public opinion and prioritize broader balance of power concerns.
The second main point of difference is in their discussions of Japan and their embrace of pan-racial solidarity. Both Du Bois and Tate saw Japan as a force against white supremacy in Asia. They both considered Japan’s military victories as playing a prominent role in overthrowing European rule from the region and establishing the possibility of an Asia free from foreign rule. Where the two break is in the degree to which they saw Japan as a benevolent regional power. In a series of articles in 1937, Du Bois considered Japanese aggression against China to be the latter’s benefit. His racialism made him unable to understand how China could despise Japan more than Europe and led him to consider Japan’s domination of China as saving “China from Europe” (Lewis Reference Lewis2000, 418–419). Du Bois justified Japan’s actions as necessary to stop European expansion in Asia and he blamed China for allowing “her bitterness toward Japanese aggression” as ruining a rapprochement “based on blood kinship and cultural likeness” (Getachew and Pitts Reference Getachew and Pitts2022, 157). Tate never excuses Japanese aggression. Instead, she cites a Nigerian nationalist Kingsley Mbadiwe who dismisses the idea that European imperial rule should be excused because “subjection under Japan or Germany would be even more bitter” (Tate Reference Tate1943a, 526). What this quote suggests is an awareness of Japanese brutality and a rejection of foreign rule entirely. Indeed, Tate praises China for fighting for “racial equality” and for “full sovereignty and independence” (Reference Tate1943a, 528).
The third key split between the authors is in how they thought about a post-World War II settlement. During the war, Du Bois participated in the Phelps-Stokes Fund’s Committee on Africa, the War, and Peace Aims (CAWPA) which sought to shape American foreign policy towards Africa after the war. The final report of this committee, The Atlantic Charter and Africa from an American Standpoint, advocated for the “international administration” of territories held by the Axis powers, proposing guardianship until these peoples proved capable of self-government in ways reminiscent of the League’s mandate system (Klug Reference Klug2025, 34). For his part, Du Bois pushed the committee to be more cognizant of the role of economic exploitation as a primary motive behind colonialism while accepting the report’s conclusions (Klug Reference Klug2025, 40). In his study of black internationalism, Sam Klug argues that this support came from a desire to hold policy influence, a paternalistic African-American attitude towards Africa, and a concern that “political self-determination” would do nothing to address the broader systems of economic exploitation that African nations found themselves ensnared in (Reference Klug2025, 35). Tate once again placed herself exactly opposite Du Bois. She saw the CAWPA report as reflecting “an egocentric view of the world” that failed to respect how Africans and Asians would no longer accept a return to the pre-war status quo of trusteeship and international mandates (Tate Reference Tate1943a, 523). Tate was aware of the economic situation but believed that “the trade regime that would emerge from the end of the war” through open-door policies would weaken the grip of the European powers (Klug Reference Klug2025, 41).
There is much less daylight separating Tate and Locke in this period. Relevant here are Locke’s Reference Locke1942 article examining “race from an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist perspective” and his editorial writings in his anthology published in 1946 (Stewart Reference Stewart2018, 823). In his article, Locke presented the international situation in existential terms as being one between “world tyranny or world order” marked by “a world of infinitely more racialism or…a world having infinitely less” (Reference Locke1942, 455–456). The fateful decision rested in the hands of the democratic countries to fulfill their commitment of ensuring “equality…[for] all peoples, races, and nations” (458). In Locke’s account, this was possible if the “world power nations…make the wise and requisite renunciations” including abandoning “irresponsible national sovereignty, power politics, military and economic imperialism, racialist notions of world rule and dominance…and the bigotry of cultural superiority” (458). As he writes in his edited anthology, “no world order with the taint of racism, extreme or moderate, is permanently possible” (Locke and Stern Reference Locke and Stern1946, 738). Both Locke and Tate understood that the postwar settlement needed to be one free from the previous vestiges of racial hierarchy. Indeed, both acknowledged the role of imperialism as being central to the creation of feelings of racial superiority (Locke and Stern Reference Locke and Stern1946, 8–9, 87, 123, 126; Tate Reference Tate1943a, 523). Where they largely differed was in how they saw the incentives that the imperial powers faced to abandon their commitment to white supremacy.
Tate couched her argument for racial equality via the threat of race war. The world could either have racial equality and peace or it would descend into a global racial conflict. Her argument granted equal agency both to the imperial powers and the colonized world. Locke took a different stance here. He acknowledged the self-defeating nature of imperialism as it would eventually “boomerang” back onto the imperial powers and could create room for “minority situations separately or in loose coalitions…[to] threaten the whole structure of European imperialism” and saw the spread of nationalism throughout the world as enabling “the selective adoption of Western technology without the previous deference for its cultural values” (Locke and Stern Reference Locke and Stern1946, 602–603, 605, cf. 736). But this alone was not enough to bring an embrace of racial equality. Locke contended instead that the battle between democracy and fascism created a “moral situation” that democracies could win by setting themselves apart from the militarism and racism that plagued fascist states (735). The quest for “moral leadership” required abandoning racial superiority since the “world-tide is now against racialism and its undemocratic attitudes and values…world leadership is not to the nation or culture that cannot abandon racial and cultural prejudice” (Locke Reference Locke1942, 456; Locke and Stern Reference Locke and Stern1946, 738). Though both Locke and Tate focused on self-interest, it is notable how they both conceptualized it differently in terms of morality and security.
As classical realists, there are obvious similarities in how Tate and Carr thought about international politics. Here I examine Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (Reference Carr1946 [Reference Carr1939]) which is often heralded as kicking off the “first great debate” and his Conditions of Peace (Reference Carr1942) which offered a socialist solution to avoid a third World War (Wilson Reference Wilson1998). As realists, Tate and Carr both centered the primacy of politics in determining outcomes rather than arbitration, institutions, and morality (Tate Reference Tate1942, x). Both have an appreciation of anarchy and how there is no “organized power charged with the task of creating harmony” and how “peaceful change” may come through a balance of power (Carr Reference Carr1946, 51, 212–214). It is unsurprising to find these similarities given how they were both examining the failure of the League of Nations with Tate considering disarmament and Carr thinking about the collapse of collective security.
However, where the two sharply break from one another is when they touch upon race. Carr often does so in passing, never pressing into lines of inquiry like how peace among the empires was fostered through “the sacrifice of unfit Africans and Asiatics” or racialization processes (Reference Carr1946, 49, 71). In his discussion of a postwar settlement for World War II, Carr called out the need for a social and economic revolution involving military and economic cooperation in Europe (Reference Carr1942, 246). He prioritized solving Europe’s economic troubles which he figured would eventually benefit the “colonial territories” (Carr Reference Carr1942, 62, 259; Haslam Reference Haslam2000, 99). Tate saw Carr’s proposal as “well-meaning but completely inadequate to the problems of a global peace.” She saw it as being focused “entirely too much in terms of saving European civilization” and failing to recognize the importance of colonies and their looming wrath (Reference Tate1943a, 523). Tate was right. Carr critiqued the right of self-determination as being a primary cause of World War II and thought that the “underdeveloped capacity of many of these peoples for self-government” made independence impractical and dangerous (Reference Tate1942, 65; cf. Haslam Reference Haslam2000, 99). Carr’s eurocentrism contrasts sharply with how Tate saw the durability of a postwar settlement dependent on the end of global racial hierarchy.
Tate in the Present
In this section, I suggest the utility of Tate’s realist approach by considering two future lines of inquiry: how racialization interacts with shifts in the distribution of power and the possibility of racial equality and interest convergence in the international sphere.
First, traditional theories of racial threat are built on domestic changes of cultural, demographic, and economic power. This includes thinking about symbolic changes in terms of descriptive representation and living in communities with greater numbers of racial Others (Hutchings and Valentino Reference Hutchings and Valentino2004). Tate’s approach treats racial threat differently. Her approach centers racialized state identities and forces us to acknowledge how policymakers do not interpret changes in the distribution of power equally. During the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Meiji Japan took the conflict as an opportunity to lay claim for equal treatment and their belonging within the family of civilized nations. Aware of their perceived racial inferiority, Japan intentionally tried to present themselves on the international stage as a “civilized” power that had mastered European laws of war and European military tactics (Howland Reference Howland2007; Paine Reference Paine2003, 132–134, 163). Japan’s efforts had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, Japan was recognized by Britain, Germany, and Russia as a serious regional power that needed to be respected. On the other hand, their victory incited widespread racial panic and a sharp global increase in the “yellow peril” discourse (Akira Reference Akira, Spang and Wippich2006, 81). This racialized fear emerged despite Japan signaling their embrace of European norms and their efforts to distance themselves from their Asian identity. Tate’s approach calls attention to these symbolic and material dynamics by treating race and military practices as entangled and interlinked. It would advance existing scholarship on race and power transitions which has normally examined it in the context of racialized cooperation during the Great Rapprochement between the United States and Great Britain (Vucetic Reference Vucetic2011).
Second, Tate’s approach has an interesting affinity with Derrick Bell’s notion of interest convergence. In brief, Bell viewed progress for subjugated racialized peoples as contingent on their interests aligning with the dominant racial group. Bell (Reference Bell1980) saw national security concerns during the Cold War as a primary cause that led white Americans to support desegregation. In international politics, as Tate’s realist take shows, states compete with one another in pursuit of their own interests. This creates different avenues for racial progress both within states and between them. After World War I, the United States engaged in an ideological competition with the Soviet Union over the building of international order. This led Woodrow Wilson to wrest the discourse of self-determination away from Vladimir Lenin and to position himself as a moral champion. The resonance of the principle of self-determination inspired colonial resistance throughout the empires even though Wilson did not intend to bring imperial rule to an end (Manela Reference Manela2007). Similarly, there was a general concern of World War I spreading to Africa because of how it would fracture “pre-war white cultural unity” and “undermine the racial hierarchy on which white rule rested” by empowering and arming black troops. These concerns led the British to be mindful of not allowing “black natives” to see the surrender of white German troops (Jones Reference Jones, Gerwart and Manela2014, 64–65). Within the United States, Christopher Parker has shown how black World War II veterans returned home skilled in the art of self-defense and feeling empowered to lay claims on equal citizenship. Their sense of sacrifice and experience in combat enabled them to engage in collective mobilization emboldened to stand steadfast in the face of violent racist actors (Parker Reference Parker2009). What these brief examples suggest is how the pursuit of the national interest can lead to the undermining of racial hierarchy domestically and internationally. To be sure, I do not mean to present security competition as a net-positive. War is terrible with devastating consequences that can reverberate for generations. My point here is to simply suggest that broader competitive dynamics can sometimes produce positive externalities. Academics would do well to identify the conditions under which these externalities are produced in order to best take advantage of situations when these conditions are present.
Conclusion
In this article, I have returned to the Howard School’s Merze Tate and laid out her classical realist approach to disarmament and racial hierarchy. I have shown how Tate centered the distribution of military power as a structural cause of state behavior and how this factored into her explanation of disarmament failure and her understanding of race war as a potentially emancipatory act. Through a comparison with her contemporaries, I demonstrated how Tate’s approach differed from other prominent scholars like Du Bois, Locke, and Carr. Tate’s realist approach to racism makes her a unique thinker of international politics that enabled her to appeal across different camps of IR. In doing so, I have made the case for a return to Tate’s insights into the study of race and international politics.
This is a necessary intervention at a time when the second Trump administration has returned to an American foreign policy style more reminiscent of the 20th century than the postwar era. The open embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, or the “Donroe Doctrine,” has come with a return to naked imperialist actions with the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and continued threats to Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico (Zhuang 2026). These actions make no claims to liberal norms but are justified on realpolitik grounds with President Trump’s aide Stephen Miller arguing that the world is “governed by force” which represent the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” (Cameron Reference Cameron2026). This has come alongside a return to racialist and civilizational discourses about the need to restore “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” (Trump Reference Trump2025, 5). This has been paired with concern over racial discrimination against “white people” in the United States and abroad with proposed changes to refugee policies that prioritize groups like South Africa’s white minorities (Kanno-Youngs and Aleaziz 2025). Rather than treat these dynamics separately, we would do well to consider the relations between them. Thinking with and alongside Tate does just that.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Sharon Bonilla, Charity Coleman, Arjun Chowdhury, Joseph Clarkson, Errol Henderson, Rosemary Kelanic, Jing Li, Richard Maass, Joseph Parent, Sebastian Rosato, Robert Vitalis, the Institute for Liberal arts, and the Notre Dame International Security Center for funding support, and the archival staff at Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections. I am grateful for the feedback received at Boston University’s Emerging Scholars conference in September 2023 and to the three anonymous reviewers.
Funding statement
The Institute for Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame and the Notre Dame International Security Center provided funding. They did not play a role in the analysis or writing of the manuscript.
Competing interests
None.
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