U.S. Empire and the “Adaptive Education” Model: The Global Production of Race

Abstract

Following World War I, the U.S. Department of Labor worked with a large-scale commercial philanthropic endeavor called the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer educational policies designed for African Americans to West Africa and South Africa. They specifically promoted the “adaptive education” model used at Tuskegee and the Hampton institutes for African American education. This model emphasized manual labor, Christian character formation, and political passivity as a form of racial uplift. They relied upon the sociologist and educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, Thomas Jesse Jones, to advocate for the transnational development of the model. Juxtaposing Jones’s advocacy for the adaptive education model in Education in Africa and W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of the model in The Crisis and Darkwater, the author finds that two different conceptions of the U.S. racial state emerge. According to Jones and Du Bois, why did the U.S. racial state decide to link African Americans and Africans as similar objects of political intervention? Furthermore, can this dynamic be conceptualized within a theory of race that conceptualizes the U.S. racial state as a nation-state?