"What's Past is Prologue..."
What follows is an excerpt from an extraordinary speech Toni Morrison delivered at Howard University on March 2, 1995. Much of the address is concerned with a celebration of the historic role her alma mater has played in the long battle against segregation. But in the middle of the speech Morrison abruptly turns to a consideration of the contemporary face and lineaments of racism and its role in the construction of a new brand of fascism in thls country.
--The Editors
Racism and Fascism
by Toni Morrison
May 29, 1995
The Nation
[NOTE: This speech also appeared in The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 64, No. 3, Myths and Realities: African Americans and the Measurement of Human Abilities (Summer, 1995), pp. 384-385]
PHOTO: The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, by Toni Morrison, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019
PHOTO: Toni Morrison (1932-2019) Receiving the Nobel prize for literature from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in the Concert Hall in Stockholm in 1993
Photograph: AP
[PLEASE NOTE: This speech excerpt was reprinted in the last book by Toni Morrison (1931-2019) entitled The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019]
Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something perhaps like this:
1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
5. Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy-especially its males and absolutely its children.
9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudosuccess; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.
In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.
The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist-we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, CocaCola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks Ideology, but it is really just marketing--marketing for power.
It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship; all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones-so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers-so individuals become angry at even the notion of the publlc good. It changes neighbors into consumers-so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compasslon or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking-so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against thew health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product-a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car-or kill generations for control of products-oil, drugs, fruit, gold.
When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas “marketplaced,” our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves livmg not in a nation but in a consortium of Industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.
