Racial Hierarchy and the Balance of Power: Race War in Merze Tate’s International Thought

Abstract

This article recovers the international thought of Merze Tate, the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in government from Harvard’s Radcliffe College. I reconstruct Tate’s classical realist approach and show how she applies it to the causes of disarmament failure and views race war as a challenge to global racial hierarchy. Tate’s realist approach highlights an alternative approach to racism in international politics that centers the international distribution of power. I make my argument through a close reading of Tate’s early writings in the 1930s and 1940s and compare it to contemporary writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and E.H. Carr. The article makes three contributions: it recovers Tate’s intellectual legacy and advances recognition of early twentieth-century black women thinkers; it develops the Howard School of International Relations’ contributions to IR theory; and it enriches our understanding of racism in the international system.