Racial Violence in the Global South

Abstract

This chapter explores the manner in which “explicit and implicit racial and colonial/imperial assumptions” operate in ways that proliferate domestic and international violence. The chapter begins by first examining the moment after the Second World War when there was the impetus for decolonization and a drive for global racial equality emanating from the global South. The second part of the chapter then explores the American intervention in Vietnam as a manifestation of this continued global racial imaginary. American violence in Indochina ran parallel to the exacerbation of racial violence at home. Here the discussion turns to African American writers, in particular Martin Luther King Jr., who were able to clearly see the connections between American violence abroad and the persistence of racial suppression and violence at home.