Summary
Feldman’s name for the ideas informing the U.S. state’s official commitment to African American integration, Jewish assimilability and liberal international governance, whose Cold War consolidation displaced Arab and Palestinian critiques of Zionist settler colonialism (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 223-235, 293-335).
Details
- Racial liberalism fused economic and political criteria into an individuated subject of rights oriented to the pluralist nation, and was understood as crucial in the Cold War fight against communism (line 225).
- Its account of Jewish assimilability fused Jewishness with political Zionism and sedimented the exclusion and devaluation of Palestinians and Arabs, recoding settler colonial violence in West Asia as Jewish national liberation (lines 227-229).
- At the UN it took the form of an “imperial internationalism” inherited from the League of Nations Mandate system, framing decolonisation as orderly and Euro-American-guided (lines 231-233).
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s domestic race work and his 1975 UN performance against Resolution 3379 exemplify its internationalisation and its consonance with color-blind ideology (lines 293-335).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, U.S. imperial culture, Daniel P. Moynihan, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379