The new Negro on campus

the long version

The global race revolution of the twentieth century is arguably the central story of modern international history. The end of European empires in what Cold War intellectuals and policy makers christened the "Third World" forces historians to rethink traditional periodizations. Scholars speak of a "pre-Columbian" era before the spread of Western empires overseas; the retreat of those empires logically suggests the arrival of a post-Columbian era. As colonized peoples seized self-rule, ethnic minorities led a parallel fight for equality in the West. In both cases the basic mission was the same. In the colonized lands creating nations meant delineating "imagined communities" and sovereign states to house them. In the metropoles the fight for civil rights meant redefining existing nationalities to encompass ethnic minorities and to fulfill a long-denied promise of equal citizenship. The chronological coincidence of these struggles, in retrospect, was not mere coincidence. Both hark back to fundamental, constitutive questions of citizenship and nationhood, questions long disallowed under both imperial and segregationist rule. The literature on these intertwined developments - Third World decolonization and American desegregation - has coalesced into a synthesis of international history, one underscoring the millennial importance of the global race revolution.