Black America Must Pay Attention to Global Power

By Julianne Malveaux
(TriceEdneyWire.com)

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.

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.

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.

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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.