Asian Angle | Foreign lives matter. Asia should beware of racist US foreign policy

In a recent interview on CNN to promote his new film BlacKkKlansman, the film producer Spike Lee said he keeps making films on race because America has never come to terms with its history of slavery and racism. He is right but could have gone further and said that neither has it confronted how its foreign policy is shaped by the deep-seated racism that moulds the political views of its leaders.

The past few months have revealed a great deal of that ugliness in the American government and its society. A low point was the president’s assertion in Europe in July that immigration was bad because it would “change the fabric” of Europe, copying word-for-word the terms used by white nationalists throughout the West. He had said similar things about his own country, calling migrants from Central America “invaders” and an “infestation”, all the time playing to his approving base.

But perhaps we should not be surprised. A large part of American politics is, and always has been, motivated by racial resentment. For many Americans, the United States is, and should be, a white-majority country, and policies should endeavour to keep it that way. White supremacists are now coming to the fore as they confront the reality that the non-white population will soon outnumber whites. Several African-American writers, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, have written on this central trend in American history.

One can understand why this is bad for the multicultural and multiracial US. But why does this matter to other nations?