The “N” badges for Negro workers used at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, have been made standard by the Navy Department, according to a letter to the N.A.A.C.P., from Ralph A. Bard, assistant secretary of the Navy.
Bard said that the badge was developed for emergency use at a West Coast Yard and that by instructions of the Navy department was made standard “some six months ago.” He asserted that the letters W (for white) and N (for Negro) are inconspicuous and cannot be construed to be discriminatory.
Bard claimed: “Letters to designate the race of the individuals concerned … are not merely restricted to the white and colored races, but many others.”
The N.A.A.C.P. replied on Friday, October 31. “The question is not,” it said, “whether the designation is ‘discriminatory’ or not. It is humiliating, insulting, and unnecessary. It offers a gratuitous affront to Negro American citizens by labeling them (as though a man with colored skin needed to be labeled) in much of the same manner as the labels used by the Nazis to designate Jews from so-called Aryans in Germany.”
In reply to the Navy’s statement that “many others” are labeled according to race, the N.A.A.C.P. asked, “What others?”
The Association also pointed out that the Navy has gone far afield in this manner, and reminded Bard that private industries employing both colored and white workers have not found it necessary to use any such designation on badges.
This is historically illiterate.
The US did not have hegemony in the areas threatened by the Nazis.
The US didn't want the UK and France to fall. The US was a latecomer to the colonial race and far behind the other powers, therefore it had an interest in maintaining free trade in the colonized regions at the expense of the colonial masters. Nevertheless, they correctly assesed the UK and France to be better than Germany, both morally and as trade partners.
When the USSR joined the war, America gave it support too.
Roosevelt did not see the USSR as an enemy, either immediately or long term, which angered Churchill, Truman, and others. He saw the USSR as a foreign power with its own interests, same as France or Britain, and if those interests were accomidated there would never be need for war.
The US didn't care much about minorities, but it did care about white people. It did have serious objections to the political system the German people lived under and didn't want it to spread. The "anti-totalitarian" movement, targeting both fascism and socialism, was a sincere response to the threat these systems posed to bourgeois moral and political outlooks.
American hegemony did exist in the Pacific but even Japan's rise was not enough to provoke a war. Instead, they opposed Japanese Imperialism economically and supported Japan's enemies, both other Imperialists and some anti-Imperialist movements. It took a Japanese attack to make America declare war.
As for Germany, the US only went to war with then because Germany declared war on the US.