Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States
by Charisse Burden-Stelly
University of Chicago Press, 2023
[Publication date: November 14, 2023]
A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government’s anti-communist repression.
In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United
States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black
Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality
of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist
uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a
force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare,
Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of
these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as
the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression,
she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.
Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the
East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces
the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing
phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US
Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy
built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism,
the violent processes by which businesses and the US government
structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and
racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the
government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The
state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black
anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary
response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism,
the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red
and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.
Black Scare / Red Scare
illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but
also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black
liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers
working within and alongside the international communist movement and
analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing
suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of
administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates
emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights
into Black political minorities and their legacy.
REVIEWS:
“Burden-Stelly is not content with simply contributing to existing scholarship. She shakes things up. And Black Scare / Red Scare
hits with volcanic force, sweeping away the prevailing tendency to
underestimate the Black Marxist threat to racial capitalism and the
embedded anti-Blackness driving state repression. Burden-Stelly details
precisely how the ‘political economy of capitalist racism’ played a
decisive role in the super-exploitation and subjugation of the Black
working class, resulting in a protracted war on Black radical movements.
A powerful, pathbreaking work that not only reorients the long history
of anticommunism on Black liberation but moves the theory of racial
capitalism to an entirely new level.” -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Burden-Stelly is one of our most brilliant radical thinkers and scholars. In Black Scare / Red Scare
she recounts, reassesses, and reframes the historical relationship
between white supremacy and anti-communism. In light of growing racist
authoritarian movements today, the book could not be more timely.
Powerful and powerfully relevant.” -- Barbara Ransby, historian,
activist, and author of the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black
Freedom Movement
“Engaging various disciplines including Black studies and political theory, Black Scare / Red Scare is
a highly sophisticated and timely book. Beginning with the Bolshevik
Revolution and ending with contemporary federal campaigns aimed at
surveilling and quelling radical Black thought and activism,
Burden-Stelly’s deeply researched study presents the long history of two
overlapping panics: the Black Scare and Red Scare. A major contribution
to the field of African American history, Burden-Stelly brilliantly
illuminates how anti-Black and anticommunist sentiments unfolded as the
United States pursued capitalist and global dominance. Black Scare / Red Scare is
certain to transform our understanding of the origins of anti-Black
radicalism and histories of Black activists’ collective fight for
liberation and struggle against ‘US Capitalist Racist Society.’” --
LaShawn D. Harris, Michigan State University
“This book is truly one of a kind. The subject matter is timely, and its analysis could not be more original. Black Scare / Red Scare will
spark widespread debate and continue to be read for many years to
come.” -- Jonathan Fenderson, Washington University in St. Louis
“Black Scare / Red Scare
is a historical and theoretical tour de force. Burden-Stelly explains
how the development of anti-Communism and the suppression of Black
radicalism became intertwined central governing priorities that
bolstered US capitalism from the First World War to the Cold War and
beyond. The eventual construction by government officials of what
Burden-Stelly calls ‘True Americanism’ legitimized business interests’
racialized profiteering by condemning its critics as radical alien
outsiders. These trends reshaped all branches and levels of government.
No previous book has analyzed the dizzying array of committees and
organizations whose purpose was to quash democratic opponents to US
capitalism: the FBI and its Dies Committee, paid informants and
infiltrators, and the courts all dedicated untold resources to smashing
threats to US racial hierarchy and the economic inequality it fostered. Black Scare / Red Scare
ultimately reveals a countersubversive political tradition, developed
over the past century, that connects to current attacks on ‘Black
Identity Extremism’ and ‘wokeism’ as distractions from actual fascist
developments in American society. All scholars and activists interested
in antiracism and democracy in America need to engage with this
pathbreaking book.” -- Erik Gellman, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
“With Black Scare / Red Scare,
Burden-Stelly enters the pantheon of Black radical thinkers, past and
present. Analyzing phenomena ranging from the structural location of
Blackness to the resurgence of fascism, Black Scare / Red Scare demystifies
the processes that subjugate Black lives and sustain economic
domination. Do not miss this meticulous and uncompromising study.” --
Vaughn Rasberry, Stanford University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Charisse Burden-Stelly is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the coauthor of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History and the coeditor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, a collection of essays by Percy C. Hintzen.
Death's Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power
by Sampada Aranke
Duke University Press, 2023
[Publication date: February 24, 2023]
In Death’s Futurity
Sampada Aranke examines the importance of representations of death to
Black liberation. Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and
films that focus on the murders of Black Panther Party members Lil’
Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson to construct a visual
history of the 1960s and 1970s Black Power era. She shows how Black
radicals used these murders to engage in political action that imagined
Black futurity from the position of death. Photographs of Hutton that
appeared on flyers and posters called attention to the condition of his
death while the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton
enabled the consideration of Hampton’s afterlife through visual
meditations on his murder. Printmaking and political posters surrounding
Jackson’s murder marked the transition from Black Power to the prison
abolition movement in ways that highlighted the relationship between
surveillance, policing, incarceration, and anti-Black violence. By
foregrounding the photographed, collaged, filmed, and drawn Black body,
Aranke demonstrates that corporeality and corpses are crucial to the
efforts to shape visions of a Black future free from white supremacy.
REVIEWS:
"The
author’s close readings of the role of visual artifacts in generating
consciousness, agency, and a sense of futurity about a better future in
their audiences is both compelling and original, and her engaging prose
makes it a pleasure to read."―Simon Stow, European Journal of American Studies
"Aranke
provides a lyrical and materially nuanced account of how the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense mobilized a range of visual media,
objects, and tactics. . . . In the process, Aranke not only reorients
our understanding of 'the political' in art of the 1960s, but also puts
tremendous pressure on art-historical conceits such as 'the curatorial,'
which in the Panthers’ hands does not mean protecting priceless
artworks within neoliberal institutions, but rather involves preserving
the bloodstained objects left in [Fred] Hampton’s apartment in order to
make visible the anti-Black violence that enables the coherence of
American 'civil society" and the ongoing expansion of the carceral state
undergirding it."―Artforum
“Sampada
Aranke’s writing represents what is most exciting about contemporary
cultural inquiry situated at the intersection of Black studies and
art-critical praxis. In this provocative and bracing book she enriches
our political and philosophical understanding of the Panthers’ ambitions
and takes up the challenge laid down by Black radical thinkers to
consider forms of death as revolutionary acts, all while reframing our
assumptions about the work of writers who have become foundational to
the project of critical theory in the United States. This rich and
highly compelling contribution to Black studies will be of immense
interest to students and scholars across the humanities.” -- Huey
Copeland, author of ― Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sampada Aranke is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
