“White Male Experts, Cultural Insecurity and Knowledge Production in Cold War America”

Abstract

Christian Dayé provides an important history of RAND and its scientists/experts during the Cold War period. He lifts the veil off of a Cold War effort whose history is not well known. Given the cultural insecurities in America in the aftermath of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war and the developed nuclear capacities of the Soviet Union, he takes us into the 1950s and the terrain of RAND. We receive a deep, quite granular analysis of a select group of natural and social scientists who contend with the issue of Cold War cultural insecurity and the future. What does the future portend? The answers become bound up in a methodological journey articulated by Dayé that has implications for today. Given this, I pivot from Dayé’s groundings in a generalized cultural insecurity in America about the Bomb to a grounding that situates white male expert knowledge as not innocent of the U.S. racial order and racism. This narrative centering racism and the Cold War is fueled by radical Black Peace activists W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones and others who struggled intensely against the racialized realities of the Cold War. Their interrogations and activism shed light on the nature of knowledge production in a race based society. Indeed, the epistemological issues embedded in white expert knowledge production have implications for today. Claudia Jones provides a theory and practice during the Cold War period centering Black women and peace. Her triple jeopardy framework makes explicit the plight of Black women under racial capitalism. Contemporary Black feminists continue to pose hard questions about what it means to deploy a critical epistemological stance and the nature of expert knowledge production.