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

Conceptions of the U.S. Racial State

Early theories in the sociology of race approached the economic and political marginalization of African Americans within the United States from three main theoretical standpoints. The three theories focused on assimilation, class subordination, and racial prejudice as the root causes of racial inequality in the United States; however, none of them focused on the role of the U.S. racial state in producing racial inequality. The assimilationist approach, pioneered by Robert Park (1914, 1928), argued that races in the United States moved through a series of successive stages, which eventually led to their assimilation into the dominant political and economic institutions of the United States. This approach conceptualized racial assimilation as similar to the ethnic assimilation of immigrants in the United States (Glazer and Moynihan 1970; Gordon 1964). The class approach framed racial oppression as an aberration, rather than a fundamental principle of American society. This theory contended that black migration from the South to the North of the United States would force blacks and whites into an overarching class system, which was the primary system of social inequality in the United States (Becker 1957; Dollard 1957; Johnson 1935; Warner and Srole 1945; Wilson 1978). Racial prejudice theories focused on racial attitudes as the source of racial inequality in the United States. They hypothesized that over time, the lessening of racial prejudice would destroy structures of racial inequality (Blumer 1958; Hyman and Sheatsley 1964; Myrdal 1944).

In the post–civil rights era, three prominent paradigms arose that directly challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of earlier theories of race: internal colonialism, racial formations, and racialized social systems. These paradigms sought structural explanations, rooted in conceptions of the U.S. racial state, to explain the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Internal colonialism, which was advanced by Robert Blauner, postulated that African Americans’ experience of racial subjugation in the United States was structurally similar to third world peoples’ experience of colonial subjugation. Blauner noted that colonialism was traditionally understood within American sociology as European conquest of Africa, South America, and Asia; however, the conquest of North America was typically overlooked. Blauner (1972) insisted that colonialism was part of the inception of the U.S. state, and as a result the struggles of Native Americans, Chicanos, and African Americans were interrelated. Sociologists later critiqued this theory for homogenizing the experiences of racial minorities. They argued that the theory collapsed class, sexuality, and gender differences in how racial minorities experienced racial inequality in the United States (Gutierrez 2004).

In the early 1980s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant developed racial formation theory. In opposition to internal colonialism, they argued that racial inequality had to be understood as a distinct structure from colonialism. They also critiqued earlier sociological theories of race, which emphasized racial prejudice as the cause of racial inequality. They argued that U.S. racial formations were not only psychological but also institutional. They defined “racial formations” as a sociohistorical process, in which human bodies and social structures were represented and organized, but also a type of institutional hegemony, in which society is organized and ruled (Omi and Winant 1994:56). They also developed a definition of the U.S. racial state as a state that constituted itself through political exclusion rooted in racial categories (Omi and Winant 1994:82).

Building from racial formation theory, in “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) questioned how the U.S. racial state reproduced itself in the post–civil rights era despite structural changes that lessened the saliency of race as a category of political exclusion. Bonilla-Silva advanced the concept of “racialized social systems,” which he defined as societies partially structured at the economic, political, social, and ideological levels by the placement of actors in racial categories or races (p. 469). He also differentiated racism from the racialized social system. He argued that racism was the ideological component of the system; however, the racialized social system was constituted by more than ideological mechanisms.

Internal colonialism, racial formation, and racialized social system theory contended that political and economic mechanisms integral to the U.S. racial state perpetuated racial inequality. However, they also conceptualized the U.S. racial state as a nation-state: contained and severed from the transnational context. Although Blauner suggested the colonialism metaphor could be used to understand racial inequality in the United States, he did not explicitly identify the relational production of race through ongoing policies, which linked African Americans to Africans. In his analysis of the “colonial labor principle,” he noted that the introduction of plantation slavery in the “new world” became a pattern for labor practices in the colonial regime of Africa (Blauner 1972:57). However, he did not identify what specific policies in plantation slavery were introduced to labor practices in Africa or how they were introduced. Likewise, in racial formation theory, Omi and Winant (1994:61) discussed the “breaching of the seal” between the new world and old world in the founding of the United States and its racialized social structure. However, they did not expand on the continued breaching of this seal by U.S. imperialism and how it constitutes racial formations in the United States. Last, Bonilla-Silva used the term racial-state but treated it as synonymous with the nation-state (Jung 2015:34). One is left wondering, in all three theories, whether the U.S. racial state is produced in and through transnational structures and policies and how.

Interestingly, Patricia Hill Collins noted that racial inequality in the United States is mirrored on a global scale, with people of African descent at the bottom. She wrote, “On a global scale, wealth and poverty continue to be racialized with people of African descent disproportionately poor” (Collins 2004:54). Furthermore, she theorized that the persistence of poor housing, poor health, illiteracy, and social problems in the United States all constitute new variations of colonialism. An analysis of how U.S. racial policy was formed in the colonial context would further illuminate how colonialism became a part of new variations of inequality in the United States.

Other scholars have more explicitly examined how the U.S. state forms policy in the global context. In particular, educational policy diffusion and world systems theories examine the global circulation of U.S. policies. Scholars who work with educational borrowing theory hypothesize that the United States exports educational models when they are facing criticism within the United States (Halpin and Troyna 1995; Nóvoa and Lawn 2002; Steiner-Khamsi 2004; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000; Yamada 2008). However, these theories do not elaborate on the way policy diffusion informs racial categories and hierarchies within the United States.

World systems theory also analyzes transnational policy diffusion. In particular, world systems theory theorizes the transfer of policies from the core to the periphery as an integral part of global capitalism (Wallerstein 2004). This analysis draws attention to how policy diffusion from core to periphery produces an exploitive labor structure for resource extraction from the periphery to the core (Wallerstein 2004). However, Robinson (2011) also critiqued this theory for reproducing the analytic bifurcation between metropole and colony: “world system theory insists that this axial division of labor must take not only a geographical/territorial form, but specifically a nation-state form, so that core and periphery by definition are spatially distinct zones in the world system” (p. 739). Thus, the theory lends itself to seeing the core and periphery as distinct and separate, rather than produced in relation to one another. In his own critique of world systems theory, Julian Go (2016) argued that the theory is unidirectional and obscures the integral role that mechanisms on the outside of the core play on the inside of the core:

Arrighi’s model divides up the complex and sprawling relations and networks extending around the globe into an “inside” and “outside”; an internal system and an external system set of relations that are ostensibly irrelevant for the inside of the system. (p. 139)

Go contended that mechanisms conceptualized as external to the core are actually an integral part of the core.

A postcolonial perspective, which emphasizes how imperial policies are shaped by the agency of the colonized (Bhambra 2014; Go 2016) and challenges the analytic bifurcation between metropole and colony (Barkawi 2017; Go 2013; Go and Lawson 2017; Hung 2017; Magubane 2017; Norton 2017), provides useful new directions for analysis in the sociology of race. It theoretically highlights why political-economic mechanisms in American empire are also an integral part of producing and reproducing the subjugation of African Americans the United States and vice versa. In this analysis of the transfer of the adaptive education model, I examine how the U.S. racial state produced and reproduced itself through U.S. empire in Africa following World War I.

Broadly, I define U.S. empire as a nonterritorial form of control, in which the United States controlled space outside of its national borders for economic gain and security (Steinmetz 2005:342). It is also a relationship of political domination, which encompasses transfers of practice from center to margin (Steinmetz 2005:356). Additionally, I examine how the relationship of political domination between the periphery and core blurs distinctions in racial formations between the periphery and core. I also use Moon-Kie Jung’s (2015:81) conception of the United States as an empire-state that usurps the political sovereignty of foreign territories and links its racially marginalized citizens to peoples in those territories.

To get at two sociological perspectives on why the U.S. racial state linked African Americans to Africans, I juxtapose Thomas Jesse Jones’s advocacy for the adaptive education model in Education in Africa and Du Bois’s critique of the model in The Crisis and Darkwater. I focus on these two sociologists because between 1919 and 1925, Jones was the primary advocate for the model and Du Bois was its primary critic (King 1971). Furthermore, it is an interesting epistemological case for sociology because the Phelps Stokes Fund advanced Jones’s conception of the U.S. racial state in sociology departments, while marginalizing Du Bois’s. More specifically, Anson Phelps Stokes insisted that Jones’s Education in Africa and Negro Education be included in the Encyclopedia of Negro Education used in sociology of race curricula at southern universities; however, Du Bois’s Darkwater was left out for being “excessively bitter” (Phelps Stokes Fund Records 1921). Ultimately the immediate aftermath of World War I heightened tensions between Jones and Du Bois and led to their divergent views on the U.S. racial state and its transfer of the adaptive education model from the United States to Africa.

Du Bois, Jones, and the U.S. Racial State

Many historians have studied the conflict between Jones and Du Bois in the domestic context (Ellis 2013; Kliebard 1994; Yellin 2002). Likewise, they have looked at the transfer of the adaptive education model to German Togo (Zimmerman 2010) and East Africa (King 1971). However, there is little analysis on how global events shaped Jones and Du Bois’s relationship or their sociological conceptions of the U.S. racial state.

In February 1918, Du Bois published his first full-length critique of the adaptive education model in The Crisis. In this editorial he discussed Jones’s (1917) advocacy for the model in Negro Education. He argued the report had strengths but was ultimately detrimental for Africans Americans’ fight for civil rights. On the report’s strengths, he stated, “It is published with the prestige of the United States government and has many excellent points” (Du Bois 1918b:173). He praised the report’s statistics on public expenditure for Negro school systems, philanthropy given private schools, and Negro property. He also praised the report’s advocacy for increased philanthropic aid to private schools.

However, he also cautioned against the report, describing it as “dangerous” and in “many respects” an “unfortunate publication” (Du Bois 1918b). Du Bois (1918b) described how the publication criticized curricula that prepared African Americans for college:

The whole trend of Mr. Jones’ study and of his general recommendations is to make higher training of Negroes practically difficult, if not impossible, despite the fact that his statistics show (in 1914–1915) only 1643 colored students studying college subjects in all the private Negro schools out of 12,726 pupils. (p. 174)

Furthermore, Du Bois (1918b) contended that Jones’s advocacy for the adaptive education model encouraged philanthropies to spend more money “in helping Negroes learn how to can vegetables than in helping them to go through college” (p. 177).

Du Bois also critiqued the report for misrepresenting African Americans’ criticism of the adaptive education model. Du Bois (1918b) contended that African Americans did not have a problem with industrial training per se but with its inclusion at the cost of college preparation:

It is not a dislike on the part of the Negroes for having their children trained in vocations, or in having manual training used as a means of education; it is rather in having a series of schools established which deliberately shut the door of opportunity in the face of bright Negro students. (p. 175)

Furthermore, he noted that African Americans did not just have some “silly desire to study ‘Greek’ as Mr. Jones several times intimates” but rather desired to develop educated men to free themselves from dependence on philanthropic aid (Du Bois 1918b:174).

Global events following World War I heightened tensions among Jones, Du Bois, and the U.S. government. On December 8, 1918, Du Bois sailed to Paris aboard the Orizaba with Jones and the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, Dr. Robert Russa Moton. Du Bois was on a mission to collect data on the abuse of African American soldiers by the U.S. military. He also hoped to obtain an invitation to attend the Paris Peace Conference to present an African American perspective on colonial policy in Africa. Likewise, Moton and Jones were on a mission for President Woodrow Wilson and the secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, to improve the morale of African American troops before their return to the United States (Lewis 1993:561).

Both President Wilson and Newton Baker feared that American Negro discontent in France would translate into racial riots in the United States. Du Bois (1919b) wrote in a May issue of The Crisis that Moton took him aside on the Orizaba and told him of “the rampant American prejudice against black American troops and officers and the bitter resentment of the victims” (p. 9). However, according to Du Bois, neither Moton nor Jones took the opportunity to collect evidence or report on racism toward African American troops by the U.S. military during their visit. Rather, Moton “rushed around as fast as possible,” did not ask for any additional information from black troops or white commanding officers, and took with him that “evil genius of the Negro race,” Jones (Du Bois 1919b). He also noted that Moton was asked by Colonel House to speak at the Paris Peace Conference about U.S. race relations but instead returned to the United States with Jones (Lewis 1993:574).

While in France, Du Bois contrasted Moton’s and Jones’s ease of access to camps with the resistance he encountered. He observed that the American Secret Service followed him from camp to camp, and the commanding officers refused to speak to him (p. 8). He also noted that despite multiple attempts to gain an invite to the Paris Peace Conference, the U.S. government made it practically impossible for him to attend (Lewis 1993:561–65).

In response, Du Bois organized an alternative conference. The Pan-African Congress gathered Africans and members of the African diaspora from around the world to develop points to present to the League of Nations on international policy in Africa. The Pan-African Congress was held from February 19 to 21, 1919 at the Grand Hotel in the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Du Bois observed in an April issue of The Crisis that the conference particularly highlighted the similar treatment of African Americans by the U.S. state and Africans by European empires. M. Candace, deputy from Guadeloupe, noted that “the rights of black Americans were met with so little respect in the United States” (Du Bois 1919c:271). Two other French deputies from the French West Indies also spoke about their “inability to understand how Americans could fail to treat as equals those who in common with themselves were giving their lives for democracy and justice” (Du Bois 1919c:271). Representatives from the United States echoed these negative assessments of the United States. William Walling appealed to Congress to increase racial diversity to reflect the diversity of the population, like the French Chamber of Deputies (Lewis 1993:576).

Anticipating this “anti-American edge,” the U.S. Army hired Jones to attend civil rights events prior to the Pan-African Congress and report African Americans who were “disloyal” to the U.S. government. In June 1918, Jones attended the National Liberty Congress and marked 25 attendees as disloyal. These 25 disloyal attendees included Ida B. Wells and William Monroe Trotter, who were later prohibited by the U.S. State Department from attending the Pan-African Congress (Ellis 2001:190).

Likewise, the State Department sent Harry F. Worley, the U.S. financial adviser to Liberia, to report back on the Pan-African Congress. In this report, Worley wrote, “I learned that the speeches of the American Negroes were highly inflammatory and condemnatory of the social conditions of the United States and inveighing against the Government of the United States” (Worley and Contee 1970). According to Worley, African Americans at the Pan-African Congress represented their treatment as worse than colonial subjects. He added that American attendees passed out copies of Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World to the Congress, “each containing large headlines and inflammatory wording, emphasizing the wrongs of the Negro race, calling on them for retaliation, and prophesying a day of judgment and retribution for the American people.”

Following the Pan-African Congress, the U.S. government pushed through policies in the League of Nations to ensure greater American control over African colonial policy. In particular, the United States passed draft mandates to allow American commercial philanthropies, such as the Phelps Stokes Fund, to expand their educational activities in the African colonies. In the draft mandate developed for British East Africa, Article 7 stated, “the mandatory shall ensure to all nationals of States Members of the League of Nations, on the same footing as to his own nationals, freedom of transit and navigation and complete economic, commercial, and industrial equality” (Beer 1923:522). This was followed by Article 8, which stated, “Missionaries of all such religions shall be free to enter the territory and to travel and reside therein, to acquire and possess property, to erect religious buildings and to open schools” (Beer 1923:522). These stipulations were also written into a revision of the General Act of Berlin (1885) and the General Act of Brussels (1890), which bound France, Portugal, and Belgium to respect freedom of trade and equal treatment of American missionaries in their mandates.

Du Bois feared that the U.S. government’s effort to develop an open-door colonial policy in Africa was connected to its efforts to block African Americans’ fight for self-determination within the United States. He observed the Department of Labor’s attempt to prevent African American labor migration from the southern United States to the North was coupled with efforts to secure new sources of cheap labor abroad. In an April 1918 issue of The Crisis he stated,

The United States Department of Labor has been doing all it can to put this light out. Long since it stopped helping Negroes to find jobs in the North. Lately it has forbidden firms from advertising for Southern labor. More lately it has begun what prove a new slavery of 100,000 workers from the West Indies. (Du Bois 1918a:267)

To counter the Department of Labor, he argued that African Americans must unite with Africans to “teach the world the ABC of American color prejudice” (Du Bois 1918a:270). Du Bois (1918a:269) warned that if African Americans fell prey to intellectual provincialism, the “‘nigger’-hating Anglo-Saxon idea” would dominate the League of Nations and the world. Indeed, there is evidence in Education in Africa and Darkwater that the transfer of the adaptive education model to Africa was part of a broader movement by the U.S. state to counter a transnational black movement for self-determination.

The U.S. Racial State in Education in Africa and Darkwater

In Education in Africa, Jones (1922) suggested that the adaptive education model should be applied to the African colonies to curb the Pan-African movement and to increase resource extraction. Likewise, in Darkwater, Du Bois (1920) suggested the model was introduced in Africa to bolster a new form of industrial slavery, which could make Africans into politically docile laborers for U.S. corporations.

Prior to Jones’s survey of West Africa, British colonial officials expressed concerns over the threat the Pan-African movement to the world order. Warning of the dangers of the Pan-African movement, in 1921 a British colonial official in German East Africa, wrote,

Much as we may desire to isolate the several fields and problems of the Negro world, the presence of the European with his world-wide interests . . . will defeat our purpose. West Africa, South Africa, East Africa, and the Negro element in America will not always remain separate entities in a black world. The interests of the negro are no longer tribal in extent, and his instincts will prompt him to seek a wider federation for his self-expression. . . . The only way to counter-act the complications which will arise is to foresee them, and to provide without delay a wise and liberal education. (Hooper 1921:8)

Likewise, Charles T. Loram, a South African social scientist who worked with the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer the adaptive education model to South Africa, argued that the academic model of education fueled Pan-African resistance. He stated, “We should take cognizance of the danger (so apparent in India and Egypt) of educating any number of individuals beyond the requirement of their race” (Loram 1917:310). He asserted that providing any type of academic training to inferior races led them to revolt and must be replaced by a model that oriented them toward labor.

In Education in Africa, Jones (1922) also argued the adaptive education could curb Pan-African resistance. He stated,

The only cure for the so-called “rising tide of color,” and “the revolt against civilization,” heralded abroad with such anxiety by some alarmists of the present time, is in the development of genuine and sincere cooperation of peoples of all races based upon an education of the Native masses and Native leaders in the common essentials of life. (p. 10)

Indeed, Jones’s views on the Pan-African movement were largely negative. Jones stated that the calls for self-determination, magnified by the Pan-African movement, were “extreme” and represented a desire to “reverse the most important lessons of history” (p. 7). He argued that Africans should realize that they must progress through cooperation with colonizers: “The evidence indicates that the history of the African people resembles that of all other peoples in the world, in that their progress has been and will continue to be the result of cooperative relationships with other peoples” (p. 7). He also argued that academic education fueled movements for self-determination: “It is significant that some of the Indian leaders of thought have recently charged much of the unrest in India to the fact that the schools have too exclusively prepared the young Indians for literary and clerical occupations” (p. 17). He concluded that native Africans must work with the “white group” to develop as a race (p. 7).

Likewise, Jones (1922) argued that the adaptive education model would increase resource extraction from Africa. In the beginning of the survey, he stated, “Civilization, exhausted by the destruction of war and the confusion of an unsettled world, looks to Africa to help replenish its resources” (p. 9). Throughout the report, Jones highlighted the potential opportunities for trade development for U.S. corporations. He noted that

the diamond fields of Kimberley, the gold ridge of Johannesburg, the coalmines of Rhodesia, the Katanga copper plateaus of Belgian Congo, and the oil areas of Angola. Every colony has some of the precious metals in forms and quantities profitable for industry and commerce. (p. 2)

However, he also lamented that opportunities to develop African’s natural resources were scarcely touched because Africans didn’t know how to work large plantations or use technology for mining like African Americans.

Jones (1922) particularly focused on opportunities for American corporations to profit from the development of the sugar, cotton, and gold industries in Africa. In his observations of Nyasaland, he stated, “One of the most interesting developments of cotton planting in Nyasaland has been the participation of Natives in the industry. This somewhat unusual cooperation opens up wider possibilities in the direction of large exports than cultivation by Europeans alone” (p. 3). Jones implied that if African labor were disciplined in the same way African American labor was to produce cotton, it would profit both the United States and the British Empire. He highlighted similarities in the role the natives in Nyasaland played in increasing the efficiency of cotton production for the British Empire and the role Black Americans played in increasing the efficiency of cotton production for the United States.

In Darkwater, Du Bois (1920) also argued that the function of the adaptive education model was to counter Pan-African resistance and increase resource extraction. More specifically, he argued that American corporations could no longer take slaves from Africa, so now they were taking slavery to Africa (Du Bois 1920:25). He stated,

Today instead of removing slaves from Africa to distant slavery, industry built on a new slavery approaches Africa to deprive the natives of their land, to force them to toil and to reap all the profit for the white world. . . . Negroes of ability have been carefully gotten rid of, deposed from authority, kept out of positions of influence, and discredited in their people’s eyes, while a caste of white overseers and governing officials has appeared everywhere. (Du Bois 1920:36)

Du Bois also argued that Jones discredited African American leaders in his visit to the African colonies. In a letter, he stated, “I have documentary evidence that Jones is at present in South Africa discrediting American Negroes, even those of the most conservative type” (University of Massachusetts Archives 1921). Indeed, in Jones’s travel diary, he noted in many of the colonies he visited that James Aggrey, a Gold Coast graduate of Tuskegee, spoke about the questionable moral character of African American leaders in the United States such as Marcus Garvey: “Aggrey heaps ridicule on the Marcus Garvey movement. At the same time, he inspires them to a strong belief in their own future” (Phelps Stokes Fund Records 1920)

Although Du Bois and Jones agreed that the model was designed to counter political agitation and increase resource extraction, they had different theories on why the United States sought to apply the same educational policy to Africans and African Americans. Jones argued that the U.S. state sought to do this because both groups belonged to the same race. More specifically, he argued that the U.S. state was a nation-state that sought to give all its citizens equal access to national rights and privileges. However, he also argued that because innate racial differences existed between black Americans and white Americans, the U.S. government had to develop policies that linked them to members of their own race in other countries. In this explanation, Jones reifies race as a sociological explanation for the diffusion of the adaptive education model. In doing so, he left the role of the U.S. state in producing racial groups unquestioned, as well as the imperial relationship between the U.S. state and African Americans.

In general, Jones argued that African Americans and Africans had the same racial needs and that this was why the same educational policy should be applied to both groups. In Education in Africa, he argued that their similar needs derived from shared ancestry and biology. Jones argued that African Americans are biologically similar to Africans because they are the descendants of Africans. He stated, “The future possibilities of the African natives may be somewhat forecast by the success of Negroes in other parts of the world, notably in America where the descendants of Africans are living in such large numbers” (Jones 1922:6). He also argued that they were culturally similar because they shared biology. More specifically, Jones depicted African Americans educated by the adaptive education model as the upper limit of cultural advancement for Africans. In his survey of Sierra Leone, he stated that many inhabitants of Sierra Leone had a “belief in the witchery of their medicine-men” and “enslavement to many forms superstition”; however, they also “show a remarkable capacity for developing as a civilized people” (p. 103). However, “Even within a few years of civilization have brought a considerable number of them to status equal that of the most capable American Negroes” (p. 103). Then, in his survey of the Gold Coast, he repeated that the most educated people resembled African Americans. He stated, “In appearance and manner they resemble the educated classes of American Negroes” (p. 124). Interestingly, throughout the survey, Jones did not compare Africans to one another but consistently compared them with African Americans.

Ultimately, Jones (1922) argued that the same education model should be applied to both groups, because they belonged to the same race:

As the most important work of the Fund to date has probably been the preparation of a two-volume report on “Negro Education,” published by the United States government, it seemed fitting that the Fund should apply the same methods of study that had proved helpful in improving educational conditions among American Negroes to members of their race in Africa. (p. xi)

For Jones it seemed “fitting” to apply the same model to Africans, because African Americans were more similar to members of their own racial group on another continent than to white Americans. Furthermore, he implied that their racial characteristics superseded any cultural, historical, or geographic distinctions.

Furthermore, even as Jones acknowledged similarities in the U.S. state’s treatment of African Americans and the British Empire’s treatment of its colonized subjects, he maintained that the United States was a democratic nation-state. More specifically, he argued that the United States was a democratic nation-state because it sought to give all its citizens equal access to national rights and privileges. Regarding why the U.S. government developed a different education policy for African Americans, Jones (1922) stated,

although the door was and always should be kept wide open for a higher education through some institutions specially intended for those men and women of the black race who have the ability and the character to profit by the training of the academic college. . . . Experience shows that those who can profit by such advanced work are in the small minority among white people, and they will doubtless continue, at least during our generation, to be in an even smaller minority among black people. (p. xxiv)

Jones contended that the United States did provide equal opportunity for all its citizens to access national rights and privileges; however, African Americans’ cultural and biological characteristics kept them from accessing them. Therefore, it was not the U.S. state itself that was producing vertical distinctions among its citizens (characteristic of an empire-state); it was the existence of races that produced these distinctions.

Jones also used the reification of race to argue that it was the race of African Americans that linked them to Africans and not their similar treatment by an imperial state. Jones (1922) stated,

Though village conditions in Africa differ in many respects from those in America where these activities have had great influence for the improvement of rural life, the resemblances are sufficiently numerous and real to warrant the belief that the plans above described may be adapted to colonial conditions in Africa. Some observers who know Africa and who have visited certain sections of the American states where the Negroes form a large proportion of the population have maintained that the conditions are strikingly similar. (p. 35)

Jones noted that the “conditions” of African American and African communities were strikingly similar. He attributes this similarity to the cultural and biological characteristics of the racial group rather than their similar treatment by an imperial state.

Conversely, Du Bois argued that the racial distinction did not simply exist but rather was constructed by the U.S. state. More specifically, he argued that the United States, in collaboration with other empires, is producing the “Negro” race, by subjecting both African Americans and Africans to similar policies. According to Du Bois, the U.S. racial state linked Africans Americans to people subject to U.S. imperialism in Africa. In doing so, it discursively produced a homogenous black race as an object of political intervention.

Unlike Jones, Du Bois conceptualized the United States as an empire-state. He argued that the United States was not structurally designed to give its citizens equal access to national rights and privileges. Rather, the U.S. racial state was an empire-state that usurped the sovereignty of foreign territories and then linked its own marginalized citizens to those populations through policy diffusion. In conceptualizing the United States as an empire-state, Du Bois illuminated political and economic mechanisms that produced similarities in the two populations that had little to do with supposed biological or cultural similarities. In fact, in a February 1919 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois actively challenged the notion that African Americans were more African than American because of their race. Du Bois (1919a) stated,

Once for all, let us realize that we are Americans, that we were brought here with the earliest settlers, and that the very sort of civilization from which we came made the complete adoption of western modes and customs imperative if we were to survive at all. In brief, there is nothing so indigenous, so completely “made in America” as we. It is as absurd to talk of a return to Africa, merely because that was our home 300 years ago as it would be to expect the members of the Caucasian race to return to the fastnesses of the Caucasian mountains from which, it is reputed, they sprang. (p. 166)

For Du Bois, what linked African Americans and Africans was not their biology or their culture but rather their political treatment by the U.S. empire-state. The U.S. racial state then in turn pointed to the low status of African Americans and Africans as a reason for their continued subjugation; This falsely turned an action of the U.S. empire-state into a characteristic of a group of peoples.

Regarding this similarity, Du Bois argued that U.S. government officials knew that the adaptive education model worked in a colonial context because it worked in the southern United States. Following the Civil War, the adaptive education model helped rebuild the southern agrarian economy and repay the southern states’ debts to the federal government. Therefore, the U.S. government reasoned that it would help other empire-states repay their debts to the United States and build their agrarian economies. Du Bois (1920) observed,

The South has invested in Negro ignorance; some Northerners proposed limited education, not, they explained, to better the Negro, but merely to make the investment more profitable to the present beneficiaries. They thus gained wide Southern support for schools like Hampton and Tuskegee. . . . And the reaction toward this caste education has strengthened the idea of caste education throughout the world. (p. 122)

Like its function in the American South, the U.S. government sought to use the adaptive education model in Africa as a means to make native Africans into “hand maids of production.” The model would make African laborers exist “for the sake of its mines, fields and factories.” It would make education train a “mass of men as servants and laborers and mechanics to increase the land’s industrial efficiency” (Du Bois 1920:123)

Indeed, during and right after the war, the British Empire, alongside American corporations, confiscated land for resource extraction. In Darkwater, Du Bois (1920) described a law in South Africa following the war that assigned nearly 250 million acres of natives’ land to 1.5 million whites, leaving only 6 million acres of swamp to half a million blacks. Another law in Rhodesia resulted in the confiscation of 90 million acres from natives. In the Belgian Congo, all the land was declared property of the Belgian government. Likewise, in St. Thome and St. Principe, all but slavery in name was established in the cocoa industry. Du Bois (1920) contended,

Is it a paradise of industry we then contemplate? It is much more likely to be hell. . . . All the industrial deviltry, which civilization has been driving to the slums and backwaters, will have a voiceless continent to conceal it. If the slave cannot be taken from Africa, slavery can be taken to Africa. (p. 64)

Collapsing the distinction between the United States as a nation-state and European states as empire-states, Du Bois argued that the United States had a chance to emerge as a national democracy following the Civil War but instead decided to usurp the sovereignty of peoples in foreign territories and then link them to African Americans through policy diffusion. Du Bois (1920) stated,

But what of this? America, Land of Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker peoples were concerned. Absolutely without excuse she established a caste system, rushed into preparation for war, and conquered tropical colonies. She stands today shoulder-to-shoulder with Europe in Europe’s worst sin against civilization. (p. 50)

By linking African Americans in the United States to peoples from whom it usurped sovereignty in other countries, the United States created hierarchical differentiations among its own citizens. It linked African American citizens to peoples subject to imperial rule through policy transfers and in practice gave African Americans the same limited access to national rights and privileges as those peoples it usurped sovereignty from. Thus, what linked African Americans and Africans was not their “race” but rather their relationship to the U.S. empire-state and the policies it used to produce their economic and political subjugation.

Conclusion

Juxtaposing Jones’s (1922) Education in Africa and Du Bois’s (1920) Darkwater, two different conceptions of the U.S. racial state emerge. For Jones the United States was a racial state because it created specific policies for particular “races” of people. Races exist out there, so the U.S. nation-state represents them by creating policies rooted in those categories. For Jones, the U.S. racial state is also a democratic nation-state that in the long term seeks to overcome the existence of races by providing opportunity for all people to gain equal access to national rights and privileges.

Conversely, Du Bois conceptualized the U.S. racial state as inherently racial because it produces races through transnational policies that link Africans and African Americans as similar objects of political intervention. The U.S. racial state is not a nation-state but rather an empire-state that structurally links African Americans to colonized peoples. It does not produce a horizontally homogenous population characteristic of the nation-state, but rather a vertically differentiated population with unequal political access to the national institutions.

Today commercial philanthropies continue to link African Americans and Africans as similar objects of political intervention. The Bridge International Academies, developed in 2009, and funded by Pearson, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the World Bank International Finance Corporation, among others, developed the “academy in a box” to educate populations in Africa living on less than $2 a day. This program delivers a scripted curriculum from U.S.-based teams in Cambridge and other U.S. cities on Internet-enabled tablets to Africa. Its mission is to improve social conditions through transformations in human “reason.” Most strikingly, this program was modeled on the Success for All program to improve numeracy and literacy among urban youth labeled “at risk” in U.S. schools (Kirshgasler 2016).

According to the sociologist Thomas Jesse Jones, the impetus for this is that both groups belong to the same racial group. The United States is a nation-state, which simply responds to the existence of races and creates policies to try to address this fact. In other words, the U.S. racial state simply responds to the existence of races, rather than producing races through imperial policies that link African Americans to peoples subject to U.S. imperialism. In this conception of the U.S. racial state as a nation-state, the imperial policies linking African Americans to Africans, producing and reproducing “race,” are obscured. One is left wondering why the saliency of “race” as a category of exclusion within the U.S. racial state remains despite national political changes guaranteeing equal access to national rights and privileges.

However, in Du Bois’s conception of the U.S. racial state as an empire-state, the political economic and social construction of “race” through imperial policies developed by the United States are illuminated. One is not forced to reify race as a causal explanation for the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Within a conception of the U.S. racial state as an empire-state, the imperial policies that produce race despite national structural changes are revealed. Unfortunately, Du Bois’s conception of the U.S. racial state as an empire-state was left out of many early sociology of race curricula. Rather, the Phelps Stokes Fund advanced the conception of the U.S. racial state as a nation-state that sought to overcome the existence of races through national policies.

I argue that this narrowing of the conception of the U.S. racial state to the confines of the nation-state is still reflected in contemporary sociological theories of race. Despite historical and legal evidence of a very blurred boundary between the “domestic” and “foreign” in U.S. racial policy (Bell 1980; Dudziak 2011; Grosfoguel 2004; Kaplan 2002; Mignolo 2000; Singh 2004; Von Eschen 1997), many sociological analyses of the U.S. racial state remain provincial. Describing this provinciality, Penny Von Eschen (1997) stated that following the Cold War, studies of racism within the American academy went from “something understood as rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism to something seen as a psychological problem . . . a ‘domestic problem’” (p. 5).

I conclude that the exclusionary policies that make the U.S. state inherently racial are also inherently imperial and must be conceptualized within a broader framework, which does not limit its analytical scope to the nation-state. The development and function of racial policy for African Americans in the United States cannot be understood in isolation from U.S. imperialism. More specifically, the subjugation of African Americans in the United States cannot be understood or addressed in isolation from U.S. political and economic subjugation of peoples outside the United States.