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Race in international relations
"'Backward' Peoples Under the Mandate System" by Raymond Leslie Buell demonstrated the prevailing attitude towards racial hierarchy by white scholars at the time. In this article, Buell justified the mandate system which functioned as a racial hierarchy with European countries along with Japan and South Africa, being given control over various parts of Africa and Asia. The mandate powers functioned. This system also enabled the extraction of resources out of colonies for the enrichment of the mandate powers. Buell goes on to state that white people grew more kind to colored people as seen by the ending of slavery and hoped that the "colored problem" could be resolved by a treaty of the mandate powers. This view of race in international relations as a "problem" which could be resolved through racial hierarchy was directly challenged by members of the Howard School through the strategy of decolonization. Furthermore, members of the school sought to recognize that race was a factor in international relations that should be studied and understood.

Hierarchy in international relations (aka decolonization)
A key topic advocated for by members of the Howard School of International Relations was that of Decolonization. This is the process in which colonial rulers are made to relinquish control of their colonies. At the time of the Howard School of International Relations, scholars of the school worked to connect race and colonialism to demonstrate how the system of colonization perpetuated itself and to show how this could be changed. For example, Ralph Bunche worked to replace the Mandate system with that of Trusteeship (United Nations). Rayford Logan was another key contributor to this topic and wrote “The African Mandates in World Politics” as well as doing research on the effects of colonialism in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Race hierarchy consists of the application of race relations and principles of hierarchy to explicate the display of power politics in the contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and institutionalized oppression, generally in opposition to black populations.

In an effort to contextualize imperialism in the frame of race hierarchy, Ralph Bunche, head of Howard University’s political science department from 1928 to 1942, expressed his understanding of the attitudes held by European officials and African peoples in his book, World View on Race. Bunche stated that imperialist agendas cast the unsupported image that there existed “backward” people, perpetually incapable of progress and “advanced” people, who continually guided the world into the modern, industrial age. Bunche argued that the “white man’s burden” to which European imperialist aims were attributed masked the real intentions of these countries that sought only to acquire resources found on the African continent. Bunche offered a deconstruction of the biological positioning of race put forth by Earnest Hooton by identifying phenotypical inconsistencies in race classification. Bunche asserted that race serves industrial states in ascribing to their “economic and political policy.”

Carol Anderson’s book, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, detailed the events surrounding the decision to replace the League of Nations mandate system with the United Nations Trusteeship, whose purpose was to promote self-governance among former colonies. Rayford Logan, Professor Emeritus of History at Howard, at the time, served as the chief advisor to the NAACP on international affairs as the organization planted itself in the situation regarding trusteeship. The book explained the role that the NAACP occupied in the aftermath of World War II when Italy demanded additional colonies. The NAACP, led by Logan, promoted “the wishes of the inhabitants” in opposition to Italy’s desire to reinstate its control over Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya. Another manner in which the NAACP championed the trusteeship system was by declaring that administering powers must have wanted to be able to advance human rights and the socio-economic transformation of these colonies. Although the push for trusteeship lost prioritization to strategic aims of European and U.S. American strategic aims, which constituted evidence of racial hierarchy, skepticism arose regarding Italy’s ability to sustain a viable relationship with the black colonies on whom they bombarded asphyxiating gas. The NAACP’s support of Abdullahi Issa, Somalia’s eventual first prime minister, encouraged him to persuade Dulles to permit trusteeship by likening it to destruction in Palestine. A combination of realism and idealism formed the NAACP’s adherence to the “will of the inhabitants” and desire to further arguments beneficial to indigenous populations amidst debates among European states and the United States.

Key Contributions
Eric Williams, an economic historian, taught political and social sciences at Howard from 1938 to 1955, whereafter he returned home to the West Indies. Williams, known best for his book Capitalism and Slavery (1944), developed multiple theories regarding the relationships between slavery, abolition, racism, and British capitalism. The work features four key conclusions drawn from Williams’ research on British capitalism and Caribbean slavery. The phenomenon of racism, according to Williams, emerged in the aftermath of economic exploitation of black slaves, therefore making the phenomenon a consequence of slavery. Williams also addressed the growth of Britain’s fiscal apparatus, attributing much of the empire’s industrialization to revenue garnered from its slave trade. For his third and fourth points, in contesting the notion that the advent of British humanitarianism led to slavery’s decline in the Caribbean, Williams asserts that the true factor aiding slavery’s decline was the period following the American Revolutionary War. These contributions solidified Williams’ position and scholarship in the history of The Howard School of International Relations.