Black America is often told that
foreign
policy is distant - something for
diplomats, generals, and elites in
places
most of us will never see. We are
told to
focus on schools, housing,
policing,
wages. As if global power has
nothing to
do with any of that.
That separation is a lie.
Decisions
made
in elite global spaces -
whether
at World
Economic
Forum
in
Davos, in NATO
councils, or in
negotiations
over strategic territories like
Greenland - shape budgets,
priorities,
and
power at home. They determine
what
gets
funded, what gets militarized,
and
what gets neglected. And when
resources
are scarce - or declared to be -
Black
communities feel it first.
This is not new.
Black
leaders
have long understood that
racial
justice at home cannot be
separated
from global arrangements of
power.
W.E.B.
Du
Bois
argued more
than
a
century ago that the “color line”
was
global, not merely American - that
Western
wealth was built on colonial
extraction
and racialized labor across
Africa,
Asia, and the Caribbean. Ida
B.
Wells took the fight
against lynching
overseas,
exposing U.S. racial terror to
international
audiences and
embarrassing
a nation that claimed
moral
leadership
abroad while tolerating
barbarism
at home.
And
Martin
Luther King Jr.,
in his 1967
speech,
Beyond
Vietnam,
made the
connection
explicit: a nation that spends
more
on war than on social uplift is
approaching
spiritual death. King was
condemned
for saying it. History has
proven
him right.
Today, the language has changed,
but
the structure remains.
Global elites gather at Davos to
discuss
growth, security, climate, and
“risk.” But
those conversations are not
neutral.
They are about who controls
resources,
who bears costs, and whose lives
are
treated as expendable. When melting
ice
makes Greenland newly valuable -
not as
a home to people, but as a site of
minerals, shipping lanes, and
military
advantage - we are watching climate
crisis turn into geopolitical
opportunity
for the powerful. Extraction wears
a
green suit now, but it is still
extraction.
Black Americans are told this is
none of
our concern. That is precisely why
it
should be.
Foreign policy determines whether
trillions go to weapons systems or
to
housing. It determines whether
climate
change is treated as a human
emergency
or a strategic opening. It
determines
whether debt relief is extended to
poor
nations - or whether austerity is
imposed, hollowing out social
systems
that mirror our own disinvestment
here
at home. When banks, defense
contractors, and multinational
corporations dominate global
forums,
their priorities don’t stay abroad.
They
come home in the form of budget
cuts,
privatization, and “fiscal realism”
imposed on Black communities.
Black internationalism has always
been
dangerous to power because it
refuses
this separation.
Paul
Robeson
understood this deeply.
He
insisted that Black freedom in the
United
States was inseparable from the
liberation
of oppressed people worldwide.
For
that
belief, the U.S. government
revoked
his passport, destroyed his
career,
and branded him a threat.
Robeson
learned what Black truth-tellers
often
learn: when you expose how global
power
really works, you are not debated
-
you are disciplined.
That lesson still holds.
Davos is not where democracy
happens.
It is where consensus among the
powerful is rehearsed and
normalized.
Black America ignores these spaces
at
our peril - not because we are
invited,
but because we are affected. Global
decisions about trade, climate
finance,
militarization, and extraction
shape the
economic conditions we are told to
endure quietly.
We cannot afford that quiet.
Paying attention to global power is
not a
distraction from Black struggle. It
is part
of it. From lynching to militarism,
from
colonial extraction to climate
displacement, the same hierarchies
repeat themselves - scaled up,
sanitized,
and defended as inevitable.
They are not inevitable. They are
choices.
And Black America has always been
at its
strongest when it understood that
the
fight for justice does not stop at
the
water’s edge.
