“We Sit on a Boiling Kettle”: The Influence of Race on U.S. Policy towards the Decolonization of North Africa, 1942-1962

The impact of race and racism in American history has been noted and felt for five hundred years, but the influence of race and racism on American foreign policy has only more recently received attention. Borrowing from the innovative literary theorist Edward Said, historians Michael Hunt and Douglas Little have investigated a “hierarchy of race” that developed in the nineteenth century and its imprint on the American mind. While Edward Said engaged his study of “orientalism” in the European context, Little argues that a specifically American orientalism emerged. This American version was shaped by a deeply religious American focus on the biblical significance of the Middle East and its own history of racial conflicts with Native Americans, African-Americans, and Asians. Little has argued that this emerging American orientalism deeply influenced US policymakers in the postwar period as they increased their interactions with the nations of the Middle East 9-42 .