Niebuhr, by contrast, did acknowledge that “we have failed catastrophically only on one point—our relations to the Negro race.” But what about the native people in this land? He claimed that North America was a “virgin continent when the Anglo-Saxons came, with a few Indians in a primitive state of culture.”[47] He wrote about Arabs of Palestine and people of color in the Third World in a similar manner, offering moral justification for colonialism. Niebuhr even justified U.S. imperialism, referring to America as being elected by God: “Only those who have no sense of the profundities of
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