A "Segregated" Asia?: Race, the Bandung Conference, and Pan-Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954-1955

Abstract

Writing in a March 1927 editorial for the Negro World, Amy Jacques Garvey conjectured that a “guilty conscience [had] begun to torture the white race. They foresee in awakened Asia the stern hand of retribution preparing to return measure for measure all that it has received. They are in the throes of a horrid nightmare. … The cycle of civilization is shifting, and with it the battleground of the future. The age of the Atlantic has passed, the age of the Pacific is here.” With the coming of Pacific dominance, the “superior force of Asiatic arms,” aroused against Western influence, could eventually be turned against the United States. In such circumstances, Garvey asked, would fifteen million oppressed American Negroes “say that the Asiatics are wrong to demand racial equality, or will they sing, ‘My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty’?” Although there was a future possibility that the United States might offer a hand of friendship to China, she was not optimistic the racial divide between the white and nonwhite worlds could be bridge...