Carnegie and the Racial Order

Abstract

This study argues that racial logic defines domestic American and world politics, culture, and society in a pattern of power defined by W. E. B. Du Bois as the global color line. It is a searing indictment of a system of white power that enslaved, dehumanized, killed, and maimed untold millions of people, especially of color, under the banner of a civilizing mission but actually sought to reinforce power hierarchies that relied upon white racial solidarity and consciousness. It implicates not only the white imperial global political economy but also its late nineteenth-century development, the philanthropic foundation, based on the spoils of capitalist industrialization after the American Civil War. In particular, the Carnegie Corporation’s philosophy and roles in reinforcing the racial order in the United States and Southern Africa are explored. Rather than the cuddly organization Carnegie claims to be (or to have become in its recent centenary celebrations), Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s book suggests that the Carnegie Corporation had violence at its core and traced its origins to bloody strikes in Carnegie steel plants in the 1890s and the use of black strikebreakers against a white labor force.