However white racism was ubiquitous from top to bottom of "Western Culture" up until the 1960s, and still is, though less virulent and overt than it once was, and the younger generations don't seem to buy it as much now.

I would guess that the facts in the book (who was where and talked to whom when etc.) are mostly supported by evidence, and when it speculates about thoughts and intentions then not so much. I am not aware of any big controversy about it, but I don't know if any academic historians have taken it on either.

And so even though this is a subject about which I'm deeply interested, I'm going to resist characterizing the book one way or the other, beyond saying that I am generally skeptical of history from the top-down. I think leaders are more reactive to public pressures and public-driven events than they would care to admit. This could be said without too much trepidation about the decision to go to war in 1898 and about the decision to occupy the Philippines at large, which was not a matter of public debate, but of over-eager American soldiers. I would be reluctant about any analysis that places paramount importance on the idea that racism was all that well intellectually developed in terms of an "Aryan mythology" during the period, and was much more a matter of a base sense of superiority grounded in skin color and cultural sensibility.

Here is something from HNN that I found questioning some of the diplomatic analysis:

Here are a couple works (two classic, two current) you might find to be more academic in their approach to this subject:



I really do think we're still awaiting a good synthesis of the orthodox, revisionist, post-revisionist, and post-orthodox accounts that variously ascribe "American imperialism" to have been non-existent, bold-faced, bold-faced but absent-minded, and non-existent and absent-minded. The truth lies somewhere in between, and it is clear that although Roosevelt and his cohort were important and did guide policy, that something deep-down in the American spirit allowed them to achieve this coup. How that relates to the rat race diplomatically in the Asia-Pacific is certainly a curious subject, and any good analysis of this would have to run from the imperial contact until the formation of the Axis Alliance.

I'll need to go into this more deeply when I've finished the book.

which also takes a dim view of McKinley, Teddy R., and Wilson, but views it through the lens of US politics, rather than racism, imperialism, etc.