Robert Vitalis’ new book is already sending shockwaves through the community of international-relations scholars. I witnessed its effects in microcosm when I assigned it to my graduate international-relations theory class. On the day we discussed it, the class looked downcast: the history—and by extension, the present—of the field now appeared rather different than what they had understood only a week before. We all left the class with two open questions. First, what does the deeply racist past of our field mean? Second, where do we go from here?

I address the questions later. Here, I begin with a basic observation: it should come as no surprise that the International Relations (IR) is inflected, in one way or another, by racism and racist ideology. By conservative estimates, the North American and European study of international relations qua international relations dates back to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Thus, IR originated in a deeply racist era; it developed in the context of various mutations of racism and anti-racism. Woodrow Wilson—who looms large in the study and practice of world politics—was an inveterate racist. It is something of an open secret that Foreign Affairs, arguably the most important anglophone outlet for writing on world politics, was once the Journal of Race Development—although Vitalis provides new details on its history.

While academics of East Asian and South Asian ethnicities increasingly make their mark on the field, IR scholars—from the commanding heights of the discipline on down—remain overwhelmingly white. In the United States, African Americans are profoundly under-represented, even in comparison to other subfields of political science. It is hard to overstate the lack of racial diversity in North American and European IR, and even harder to understate the number of black IR scholars.

But even this awareness fails to prepare readers for what they find in White World Order, Black Power Politics. Prior to World War II, the convergence of racial ideology and European (and American) colonial imperialism provided most of ‘the action’ in IR. For many, the primary problem of the age was the emergence of non-white racial groups as active players in world politics—whether in resistance to empire, as ‘new’ great powers (such as Japan), or as communities that challenged Caucasian dominance. Indeed, racial blocks constituted, for all intents and purposes, IR units of analysis. And yes, the line between this worldview and the Clash of Civilizations is not at all difficult to draw. Overall, fascism seems less like an anomaly than a particularly virulent variant of widespread ways of thinking about world politics.

The erasure of this history—which Vitalis sees as amounting to a whitewashing—was motivated by revulsion at Nazism, the Communist challenge, decolonization, and shifting post-war norms. It aimed at burying the centrality of race and imperialism to IR, but it simultaneously marginalize important work by black scholars and intellectuals that formed part of pre-WWII debates. W.E.B. Dubois stands as the best known among these scholars (Vitalis’ book also contributes the growing realization that Dubois deserves a place in the ‘pantheon’ of social scientists that includes Max Weber and Emile Durkheim). Yet there were others who developed important—and now largely ignored—ideas, many of which prefigured later insights into the nature and dynamics of world politics.

Vitalis’ account of the post-war evolution of international studies touches on more familiar ground. This includes the creation of area studies as a resource for American Cold War power politics. But even amongst the well-known stew of anti-communism and the development of the national-security state, Vitalis showcases black IR scholarship now written out of the discipline’s collective history. He devotes a chapter to Harold Isaacs’ The New World of Negro Americans, which, among Isaacs’ other works, concluded that “although decolonization in Africa would not lead African Americans to launch a war of liberation of their own, decolonization was hastening the end of the Jim Crow era and whites should cease the fruitless and destructive opposition to enormous changes underway around the globe” (pp. 143–144). And Vitalis chronicles the history of “The Howard School,” including Merze Tate, the “first black woman to receive a doctorate in international relations” (p. 12), whose extensive output barely registers even in contemporary histories of “African American international life” (p. 161).

The preceding discussion only genuflects at the richness of Vitalis’ revisionist account of the history of the field. Still, I think that it provides enough meat, however, to take up the two questions I raised at the outset.

What does Vitalis’ book mean for how we think about the field? Where do we go from here?

First, I am not a fan of the ‘great debates’ framework (see Jackson and Nexon Reference Jackson and Nexon2013). Still, it seems clear to me that we must add the pre-war and inter-war ‘race and empire’ debate to our syllabi and our stylized histories of the discipline. This means excavating and reading some very unpleasant works. Doing so will help us to clarify to what extent—if at all—this new ‘first debate’ undergirds later IR concepts, theories, and frameworks. It also provides an opportunity to further recover the ideas—and alternatives—from black scholars. Indeed, we have something of an obligation to build upon Vitalis’ efforts to recover minority scholarship on world politics. Otherwise we risk complicity in the racism that effaced it in the first place. This extends, as Vitalis’ book does, to the post-war period.

Second, we should take very seriously the implicit and explicit racial architectures of world politics (Sabaratnam Reference Sabaratnam2013; Shilliam ed. Reference Shilliam2010). In a well-known article, Hemmer and Katzenstein (Reference Hemmer and Katzenstein2002) argue that race plays a major role in explaining why “there is no NATO in Asia” (cf. Jackson Reference Jackson2006). Vucetic (Reference Vucetic2011) has explored the Anglosphere as a racialized identity, Vitalis, and the scholarship he highlights, suggests that alternative conceptual imaginaries—such as pan-Africanism—deserve full investigation and theorization (see Shilliam Reference Shilliam2006). This task takes on added urgency at a moment when some successful North American and European right-wing populists offer explicitly racialized frameworks for understanding politics—including international relations. The contemporary challenge of white order not only stems from its problematization by actors from the ‘global south,’ but also in the form of those who celebrate it and want to elevate its racially exclusive character. That is, who seek to undo decades-long struggles to remake international order in anti-racist terms.

Third, the field needs to commit itself to not repeating past sins. A wave of younger scholars seek to take race and diversity seriously—as subject, focal point, or both—in IR scholarship (see also Acharya Reference Acharya2014; Anievas, Machanda, and Shilliam eds. 2015; Brigden Reference Brigden2016); in this, they join more senior scholars (see Crawford Reference Crawford2002; Dunn Reference Dunn2003; Agathangelou and Ling Reference Agathangelou and Ling2004) whose work postdates Vitalis’ history of the field. IR needs to greatly expand efforts to recruit and sustain minority scholars. Indeed, Vitalis’ book raises an uncomfortable question—one that I mean in no way to distract from his achievement: why did it take so long, and for a book by a white male scholar based at an elite American university, for the field’s racist past and whitewashed present to ‘break’ into the consciousness of mainstream international-relations scholars?