Back in 2016, I was asked what I thought about Donald Trump. Even back then, I saw him as an aspiring fascist, and I responded:
Simply put. He is a conduit through which white America expresses its
most vile desire for white purity. An apocalyptically dangerous white
man who sees himself as the center of the world. That kind of hubris
bespeaks realities of genocide.
Trump 2.0 has only confirmed my fears, my dread, and my anger. Make
no mistake about it: This administration is unapologetically and
shamelessly hellbent on establishing a violent white fascistic state. I
know that some are surprised, but the truth of the matter is that the
horrible reality of anti-Black fascism is not a new formation. The soul
of this country was founded upon white power, white greed, and white
violence. So, I am not surprised by the likes of Trump; he is a product
of a vicious poison, a historical legacy, that predates his abominable
presidency. But this isn’t mere speculation or exaggeration. Our bodies
and psyches are a record of this history: chains, enslavement,
dehumanization, scarred backs, raped bodies, castrated bodies, broken
necks, broken family ties, denied rights, denied citizenship, mass
incarceration, and slow death.
Indeed, there are those Black voices who not only recorded this
history, but who understood its fascistic logics. For example, Black
poet and activist Langston Hughes wrote:
"Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in
action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic
suppression have long been realities to us."
And it was Black sociologist and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois who wrote, “We have conquered Germany … but not their ideas. We still believe in white supremacy, keeping Negroes in their place.”
Thinking about the reality of anti-Black fascism led me to the
indispensable work of Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. When it comes
to documenting anti-Black fascism, they trace a longer arc with respect
to the rise of fascism; they show just how European fascists drew from
early U.S. laws for their own specific fascist formations, and how the
U.S. functioned as the very hub of fascist discourse and practice. Given
this rich history and its importance for how to strategize moving
forward, I conducted this exclusive interview with Jeanelle K. Hope, who
is an independent scholar and a lecturer at the University of
California-Washington Center.
George Yancy: It is important to historically situate the
phenomenon of fascism, especially within our contemporary context where
the Constitution is being trampled upon, and what one might call the
paramilitary deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Your book, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition,
which you co-authored with Bill V. Mullen, powerfully challenges the
narrative that fascism is a phenomenon that is exclusive to 20th-century
Europe. In this regard, your book constitutes a necessary
counter-narrative that highlights the gratuitous violent history that
Black people in the U.S. have faced since their enslavement. This
counter-narrative is what you term the Black anti-fascist tradition. In
brief, what are some of the features that define the Black anti-fascist
tradition?
Jeanelle K. Hope: The Black anti-fascist tradition
recognizes that there has been a long arc of fascism throughout history,
and that anti-Blackness has long undergirded fascist policies and
formations, thus, disrupting prevailing historical narratives and
theorizing on fascism. We argue that the earliest roots (or pillars) of
fascism — authoritarian rule, genocide and ethnic cleansing, militarism,
racial capitalism, dual application of the law — can be traced to the
colonization of Africa and chattel slavery across the Americas. One of
the most salient and defining features of anti-Black fascism is
genocide. We chart out the systematic genocide of Black people from the
brutality of enslavement, post-emancipation lynchings, to
state-sanctioned violence and police brutality. Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors and Red Record, W.E.B. Du Bois’s lynching reports in The Crisis, William
Patterson’s petition to the United Nations entitled, “We Charge
Genocide,” and Arlene Eisen’s 2012 report “Operation Ghetto Storm” all
meticulously document the impact of lynchings and the immiseration of
Black life. And with such damming evidence in hand, they argued that
such acts constitute genocide. Indeed, “We Charge Genocide” emerges as a
cross-generation rallying cry among Black anti-fascists like Patterson,
Stokely Carmichael, and the Chicago-based youth group aptly named “We
Charge Genocide.”
Beyond presenting this counter-narrative, so much of our book also
names how Black people have been on the front lines of anti-fascist
struggles in Europe (the Spanish Civil War), Ethiopia (the Italian
invasion of Ethiopia), and across the United States. Moreover, the Black
anti-fascist tradition underscores that fascism attacks on multiple
fronts (i.e., art and cultural production, education, immigration, law
and policy, health care, housing, etc.) and subsequently, requires a
multifaceted resistance. Black anti-fascists have incorporated various
organizing strategies, tactics, and actions including legal challenges,
mutual aid, anarchy, autonomy, self-defense, boycotts, solidarity, and
abolition.
What I think is an important takeaway from the Black anti-fascist
tradition is knowing that Black people have long warned about what I
describe as fascism’s incessant creep. Fascism is not born overnight. It
is relentless and creeps through society, systems, laws, and more over
time. Black anti-fascists have played the long game, trying to check the
creep of fascism at every turn, knowing that if left unchecked,
humanity will enter some truly dark days.
In your book, you write, “By the time the regimes of Hitler
and Mussolini began to theorize racial purity and Aryan identity
politics, discussing race in this quasi-biological sense in the U.S. was
old news.” This is such an important observation as it places
anti-Black racism at the very core of the foundation of this nation.
Talk about the centrality of “racial purity” and how that myth shaped
the U.S., and how it continues to do so. And here I’m thinking about
Trump’s disgusting use of the expression “shithole countries” and his
encouragement of immigrants from Norway.
Recognizing that race/racism/racial hierarchy are at the very
foundation of colonial rule, it is of no surprise that race is also at
the crux of fascism. From the onset, the history of the United States is
marked by colonialism, and race almost immediately emerges as a system
of domination to subordinate Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans
brought to the country. This racial hierarchy had/has significant
economic and social implications. With Black, Brown, and Indigenous
people viewed as subordinate, the belief of white supremacy and white
domination in the western hemisphere was fomented. Up until the early
20th century (and some would even argue still today), great lengths
(i.e. anti-miscegenation laws, racial integrity laws,
racial purity tests, etc.) were undertaken to ensure a rigid racial
hierarchy. The mere existence of interracial relationships and
mixed-race people has long served as a threat to this system, blurring
the racial binary, and forcing society and governments to have deeper
questions about “who is white,” and thus, gets to benefit from this
system of domination.
Moreover, throughout U.S. history, this “gatekeeping” or
protectionism of the white race shows up countless times from
anti-immigration laws (i.e., the Chinese Exclusion Act), Jim Crow laws,
the eugenics movement, and recent discourse around the “Great
Replacement” theory. These efforts have largely (and unsuccessfully)
sought to stymie influxes of non-white immigration, non-white births,
and interracial relationships. It is also important to name that the
constant pursuit of white racial purity is fundamentally tied to
patriarchy, natalism and the regulation of women’s bodies, hence the
recent rollbacks on abortion access and reproductive health care.
I was aware of Adolf Hitler’s admiration for the U.S.’s
racial segregationist practices and its eugenics movement, but your
argument delineates in detail that European fascism “had its roots in
American Anti-Black Fascism.” This is a significant charge against the
U.S.’s view of itself as “innocent,” and as a “shining city on a hill.”
Indeed, it is this understanding of the U.S. that is necessary as we
currently confront fascism in this country. You write, “Seldom have
historians drawn connections between the Nuremberg Laws, Italian Racial
Laws, and Jim Crow Laws of the US.” What is it about certain historians
that they have failed or refused to make such a significant connection? I
would even say such a significant indictment.
Naming that U.S. racial policies effectively served a blueprint for
the various legal systems of European fascism would disrupt a
decades-long historical narrative surrounding WWI and WWII. The story of
the “Axis vs. the Allies,” and the United States’ role in defeating
fascism has long been the prevailing historical narrative taken up by
historians. I think there is at times a failure among historians to step
back, read across archives, and to stitch multiple historical events
together. We also must be honest that there has been a concerted effort
among both politicians and historians to preserve a liberal or redeeming
narrative surrounding the United States’ role in WWII. For example, it
took decades for mainstream American history to finally recognize that
the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war was heinous. Yet
some would still draw the line at comparing those “internment camps” to
Nazi concentration camps. But it is that type of comparison that is
direly needed to be able to understand the impact and evolution of
fascism across time and space. We must also connect the current ICE
detention centers to this broader history as well.
Finally, I think one of the biggest issues among historians, and even
many leftist activists, is the aversion to name any formation of
fascism outside of interwar Europe as fascism. For far too long, many
have believed that Hitler and Mussolini’s fascist rise was like
capturing lightning in a bottle, when fascism has long existed beyond
the confines of early 20th-century European history. From a deeply human
standpoint I understand why one would want to believe that the
atrocities of the Holocaust and Nazism could not be replicated. Yet,
Black anti-fascists have long rang the proverbial alarm about the
incessant creeping nature of fascism and its onslaught on Black life.
Furthermore, to ignore or discount the claims of Black people like
Robert F. Williams, Harry Haywood, George Jackson — among a host of
others that have named fascism as the greatest threat to Black people
(and all people) just because they don’t neatly fit within longstanding
scholarly traditions on historical fascism — to me, is ahistorical.
I agree! Talk about how contemporary forms of abolitionist
discourse and activism are linked to the Black anti-fascist tradition. I
think that such a link is so important as it communicates the
historical arc of Black people who continue to refuse fascism.
I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is
crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and
prison abolitionists starting with George Jackson, Angela Davis, Ericka
Huggins, and Kathleen Cleaver, and later in the work of Ruth Wilson
Gilmore and Dylan Rodriguez, among others. Many of the Black political
prisoners of the late 1960s and early 1970s were among the most vocal in
naming that America was engaging in fascism, arguing that prisons and
the rise of mass incarceration amounted to the latest evolution of
fascism’s incessant creep on society. They recognized that prisons
helped facilitate systematic genocide and was buttressed by a criminal
justice and legal system that openly practiced a dual application of the
law, whereby Black people were subjected to different interpretations
of the law and harsher sentences, among other injustices. I think about
Ericka Huggins’s letters from Niantic prison where she describes their
poor conditions, the inhumane nature of solitary confinement, and the
unjust way many Black Panther Party members, and other radicals of the
era, were largely swept into prisons on trumped-up charges. I even think
of those early pages of Assata Shakur’s autobiography (Assata: An Autobiography)
where she describes the guards of the prison in which she was
incarcerated giving Nazi salutes to each other. The Attica prison
uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.
Prison abolitionists have long connected American prisons to the long
arc of fascism, arguing that they are so deeply entrenched in fascism
that they are beyond reform, concluding that abolition is the only
solution. These arguments, of course, are most fervently explored in
Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? and the work of Critical Resistance.
It is from Davis and Critical Resistance’s work that more contemporary
abolitionists descend. Thus, it is of no surprise that during the height
of the Black Lives Matter movement, calls to abolish the police
emerged, and with the current wave of mass deportations and practice of “crimmigration,”
there are calls to abolish ICE. The Black anti-fascist tradition
recognizes that the incarceration of Black people has long been tied to
the fascist pillar of genocide, thus, any reproduction of incarceration —
be it ICE detention centers or Japanese internment camps — will always
be part of a broader fascist project. The harrowing reports of ICE
detention center conditions and deaths is the latest harbinger of
fascism’s incessant creep.
Given the specificity of how Black people in the U.S. have
been brutalized and dehumanized in terms of anti-Black fascist logics,
talk about what strategies have emerged out of Black struggles for
countering and resisting (I want to say overthrowing) U.S. fascism. On
this topic, I often feel a great deal of pessimism. Yet I agree with
Robin D. G. Kelly where he said to me, “There is no guarantee that we will win — whatever that means — but I guarantee that if we don’t fight, we lose.”
To feel pessimistic under the boot of fascism is only natural, and a
feeling that is important to sit with. To draw upon the words of Kelly
Hayes and Mariame Kaba, I think we also must work through that pessimism
and “let this [moment] radicalize you.” Earlier in the interview, I
highlighted some of the major organizing tactics, strategies, and
actions that animate the Black anti-fascist tradition, so I’ll use this
space to stress some more practical forms of resistance for this moment.
First and foremost, we all must begin the resistance to fascism through
organizing and studying.
Remember, fascism attacks on all fronts, so we must develop a
strategy that recognizes this and can be adapted in various spaces.
Fascist policies are dismantling public education before our eyes.
Parents and teachers must organize at the school district level to
resist book bans and anti-ethnic studies bills. And even more so,
parents must see “school choice” and “school vouchers” for what they are
— the privatization of public schools. This is anti-democratic.
Fascism will quite literally starve its constituents. I cannot
over-emphasize the importance of mutual aid in a moment where
unemployment is increasing, particularly amongst Black women, and the
federal government has slashed the budgets of many social safety-net
programs, like SNAP. As fascism seeks to further divide society, we must
remember to take care of those in our communities.
While there have been several boycotts and protests over the last 13
months, I do think there is much we can learn from European citizens
that have mounted national strikes in response to government austerity.
Overall, there is much that can be done to organize workers, as
fascism’s grip on capitalism will have disproportionate impacts on the
worker — as we are currently witnessing.
And most importantly, one of the most significant efforts we can do
to resist fascism is to build solidarity. Solidarity is crucial to
resisting fascism as it spurs organizations and mass movements.
Solidarity is built through relationships, shared struggle, and deep
communication with one another. While this work may seem ancillary, it
will prove to be our most challenging, as fascism (and predatory social media algorithms)
has fractured so many communities. Fascism thrives on division (racial,
economic, national, political, gender, age, etc.), so one of the most
important ways to resist it is to close those divides through respect
and mutual cooperation.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor
of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth
College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in
the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020
academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books,
including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).
Jeanelle K. Hope, Ph.DJeanelle K. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California, and a scholar-activist, having formerly been engaged in organizing with Socialist Alternative, Black Lives Matter-Sacramento, and various campus groups, and as a current member of Democratic Socialists of America. Her work has been published in several academic journals and public outlets, including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia Journal, Black Camera, Essence, and The Forum Magazine. She lives in Houston, Texas.
