s American exceptionalism is enjoying a revival of scholarly interest amid new approaches to studying foreign policy narratives and unease regarding how US policymakers will manage a less unipolar international system. That revival coincides temporally, though not yet substantively, with growing attention to racialized dynamics and Eurocentrism within international relations. This article examines how core strands of American exceptionalism—the prevailing narrative framing of US foreign policy—reflect a whitewashed understanding of US foreign policy that can best be understood as the product of racialized subject-positioning that saturated its historical development. After conceptualizing American exceptionalism, it develops a theoretical framework to capture how racialized subject-positioning stratifies understandings of a nation’s role in the world. It proceeds to investigate how this process shaped the development of American exceptionalism in line with epistemologies of immanence, ignorance, and innocence, producing exceptionalist narratives that neglect non-white populations as meaningful others in the construction of US national identity and that negate US interactions with those groups as relevant evidence that might undercut its exceptionalism. These whitewashing effects remained embedded even as overtly racist discourse became delegitimized, posing enduring obstacles for US diplomacy today.

中文翻译：

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粉饰美国例外论：种族化主体定位与美国外交政策


在研究外交政策叙述的新方法以及对美国政策制定者将如何管理单极程度较低的国际体系感到不安的背景下，美国例外论正在重新引起学术界的兴趣。这种复兴在时间上与国际关系中对种族化动态和欧洲中心主义的日益关注同时发生，尽管还没有实质性。本文探讨了美国例外论的核心——美国外交政策的主流叙事框架——如何反映了对美国外交政策的粉饰理解，这种理解最好被理解为渗透到其历史发展中的种族化主体定位的产物。在概念化美国例外论之后，它开发了一个理论框架来捕捉种族化的主体定位如何分层理解一个国家在世界上的角色。它继续调查这一过程如何根据内在性、无知和纯真的认识论塑造了美国例外论的发展，产生了例外主义叙事，这些叙事忽视了非白人人口在美国国家认同构建中作为有意义的其他人的地位，并否定了美国与白人的互动。这些群体作为可能削弱其例外论的相关证据。即使公开的种族主义言论变得不合法，这些粉饰效应仍然根深蒂固，为当今的美国外交构成了持久的障碍。