"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."
--Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," (Spring, 1940) trans. Harry Zohn.
WALTER BENJAMIN
(1892-1940)
(1892-1940)
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
(1929-1968)
(1929-1968)
"The first thing I would like to mention is that there must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country. Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is. It is the myth of an inferior people. It is the notion that one group has all of the knowledge, all of the insights, all of the purity, all of the work, all of the dignity. And another group is worthless, on a lower level of humanity, inferior. To put it in philosophical language, racism is not based on some empirical generalization which, after some studies, one would come to the conclusion that these people are behind because of environmental conditions. Racism is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior. And their ultimate logic of racism is genocide...The ultimate logic of racism is genocide. And we've got to see that this still exists in American society...The first thing that must be on the agenda of our nation is to get rid of racism.”
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his speech "The Other America" given at Grosse Pointe High School in Detroit, Michigan on March 14, 1968, exactly three weeks before his assasination at the age of 39 on April 4, 1968
TONI MORRISON
(1931-2019)
(1931-2019)
"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, Coca--Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure 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 public good. It changes neighbors into consumers--so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking--so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their 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," or 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 living 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."
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, Coca--Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure 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 public good. It changes neighbors into consumers--so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking--so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their 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," or 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 living 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."
--Toni Morrison, "Racism and Fascism"
Howard University, March 2, 1995
Howard University, March 2, 1995
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on October 16, 2024):
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
(Originally posted on October 16, 2024):
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Literary Giant, Social Critic, Public Intellectual, Teacher, Philosopher, and Political Activist Toni Morrison (1931-2019) on 'Racism and Fascism' at Howard University March 2, 1995
"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]:
VIDEO:
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.
The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching To Abolition
by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen
Haymarket Books, 2024
[Publication date: April 2, 2024]
The US Antifascism Reader
Edited by Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials
Verso, 2020
[Publication date: January 7, 2020]
Edited by Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials
Verso, 2020
[Publication date: January 7, 2020]
The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism.
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger.
The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.
REVIEWS:
"This introduction to the Black anti-fascist tradition is a necessary intervention for our increasingly dangerous and authoritarian times. Drawing on Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Angela Davis, and more, Hope and Mullen offer an accessible history and strategies for forward movement." —Ms. Magazine
"The Black Antifascist Tradition gives us the materials we need to face an uncertain future. The book gives us the possibility of hope based on histories and trajectories it maps and recovers. This remarkable book documents how those who began the struggle against anti-Black racism were always already 'pre-mature antifascists.'"
—David Palumbo-Liu, author of Speaking Out of Place
"As we confront, arguably, the greatest assault on our already severely limited form of liberal democracy, The Black Antifascist Tradition is essential reading for not only diagnosing the problems that we face, but rather for providing us with historical tools to fight ascendant fascism and right wing authoritarianism in the United States. Drawing inspiration from Octavia Butler to anti-lynching campaigns and the 'We Charge Genocide' movement, Hope and Mullen offer a powerful lens onto the Black Radical Tradition that moves the discussion of fascism from a narrow focus on interwar Europe to the transnational questions of racial apartheid, settler colonialism and anti-Black racism. Beautifully written and cogently argued, this book is a must read for this moment. I can’t wait to assign it in my undergraduate and graduate classes." —Donna Murch, author, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives
"The Black Antifascist Tradition is a primer on the history and legacy of over a century of Black antifascist activism. This timely collection introduces readers to the political organizing, theoretical interventions and world-making of some of the leading change makers and theorists of our times. This book is the missing link between present and past that is so urgently needed as a new generation confronts a new manifestation of old problem. A must read and infusion of hope." —Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine, Associate professsor of African American Studies and History at Wayne State University and author of The Revolution has Come: Black power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
"The Roman slave empire ruled by punishment and death, flogging, and beheading. The bundle of rods with a protruding axe blade—the fasces—were both means of execution and emblem of sovereign power. Ever since, incarceration and systematic premature death have remained the foundation of fascism. The Black Antifascist Tradition is an absolutely needed chronicle showing how Black people lead antifascism. It begins with Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Red Record against lynching in the early twentieth century and concludes with the new abolitionism against the carceral and death-dealing state in the twenty-first century. In between are the essential campaigns by the thinkers an actors of Pan-Africanism (1930s), Double Victory (1940s), We Charge Genocide (1950s), Black Power (1960s), and the anarchist antagonistic autonomy of our times, which have fought for life and for our commons."
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism.
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger.
The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.
REVIEWS:
"This introduction to the Black anti-fascist tradition is a necessary intervention for our increasingly dangerous and authoritarian times. Drawing on Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Angela Davis, and more, Hope and Mullen offer an accessible history and strategies for forward movement." —Ms. Magazine
"The Black Antifascist Tradition gives us the materials we need to face an uncertain future. The book gives us the possibility of hope based on histories and trajectories it maps and recovers. This remarkable book documents how those who began the struggle against anti-Black racism were always already 'pre-mature antifascists.'"
—David Palumbo-Liu, author of Speaking Out of Place
"As we confront, arguably, the greatest assault on our already severely limited form of liberal democracy, The Black Antifascist Tradition is essential reading for not only diagnosing the problems that we face, but rather for providing us with historical tools to fight ascendant fascism and right wing authoritarianism in the United States. Drawing inspiration from Octavia Butler to anti-lynching campaigns and the 'We Charge Genocide' movement, Hope and Mullen offer a powerful lens onto the Black Radical Tradition that moves the discussion of fascism from a narrow focus on interwar Europe to the transnational questions of racial apartheid, settler colonialism and anti-Black racism. Beautifully written and cogently argued, this book is a must read for this moment. I can’t wait to assign it in my undergraduate and graduate classes." —Donna Murch, author, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives
"The Black Antifascist Tradition is a primer on the history and legacy of over a century of Black antifascist activism. This timely collection introduces readers to the political organizing, theoretical interventions and world-making of some of the leading change makers and theorists of our times. This book is the missing link between present and past that is so urgently needed as a new generation confronts a new manifestation of old problem. A must read and infusion of hope." —Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine, Associate professsor of African American Studies and History at Wayne State University and author of The Revolution has Come: Black power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
"The Roman slave empire ruled by punishment and death, flogging, and beheading. The bundle of rods with a protruding axe blade—the fasces—were both means of execution and emblem of sovereign power. Ever since, incarceration and systematic premature death have remained the foundation of fascism. The Black Antifascist Tradition is an absolutely needed chronicle showing how Black people lead antifascism. It begins with Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Red Record against lynching in the early twentieth century and concludes with the new abolitionism against the carceral and death-dealing state in the twenty-first century. In between are the essential campaigns by the thinkers an actors of Pan-Africanism (1930s), Double Victory (1940s), We Charge Genocide (1950s), Black Power (1960s), and the anarchist antagonistic autonomy of our times, which have fought for life and for our commons."
--Peter Linebaugh, author, The Magna Carta Manifesto
"The Black Antifascist Tradition offers an indispensable framing that places Black experience at the center to show how anti-Blackness is inseparable from the development of US fascism, past and present. Through a crisp synthesis of essential writings by Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, William Patterson, Huey P. Newton, Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba, Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen make a compelling argument for reconceptualizing a race-based history of Black life through the lens of racialized fascism. An important read for anyone interested in understanding how we arrived at today’s US style of authoritarianism and state repression." —Diane Fujino, author, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
"From the sophisticated understanding of law as an agent of fascism articulated in the anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to the abolitionist theorization of fascism as both a theory of anti-Blackness and a structure of oppression by scholar-activists such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis; and with explorations of anti-colonialism, antiwar movements, and Black Power along the way, The Black Antifascist Tradition offers a careful history of Black thought and art by way of a celebration of the exquisite threads of antifascism woven inextricably into the Black Radical Tradition. Hope and Mullen detail the ways the Black Radical Tradition has not simply always been antifascist but that it has been powerfully, effectively, originally responsible for formulating antifascist analysis and strategy." —Micol Seigel, author, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police
"The Black Antifascist Tradition is a handbook a century in the making. It is a historical synthesis of how the forerunners of anti-colonial struggle, Pan-Africanism, and Black revolutionary theory and practice identified and confronted fascist emergence and organization from a local to an international scale and across the formative epochs. Richly detailed and thoroughly researched, this highly accessible and readable text is also wide-angled and multi-layered in scope--adeptly interconnecting people, places, events, and actions with their resultant insights, observations, and practical formulations. This book is the complete exposition of Black antifascist thought, and a necessary guide for the antifascist struggles of today." —Justin Akers Chacón, author, Radicals in the Barrio
"Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen have written the definitive history for one of the most important, and least discussed, pieces of the antifascist movement. Weaving together historical analysis, trenchant critique, and future visioning, this is one of the most important books on antifascism ever written." —Shane Burley, author, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
"The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition is a dazzling work of reclamation and admonition that simultaneously reaches into the folds of past and future to make an urgent, formidable case that fascism, capitalism, and anti-Black violence are profoundly interconnected. Hope and Mullen give voice to activists and intellectuals of two centuries with compelling clarity. They have produced a volume providing an astute and knowledgeable guide to a complex legacy with which every partisan of 'freedom dreams' needs to critically engage." —Alan Wald, author,Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade
"Through the dialectic of 'Anti-black Fascism' and the 'Black Antifascist Tradition,' Jeanelle Hope and Bill V. Mullen expertly convey how African descendant antifascists in the United States and beyond developed a unique interpretation of the fascist threat through their experience of, and fightback against, Jim Crow, Euro-American (settler) colonialism and imperialism, and policies and practices of white supremacy. A stunning work of historical recovery, political analysis, and critical interpretation, The Black Antifascist Tradition reads guerrilla intellectuals like Ida B. Wells and Ruth Wilson Gilmore into the tradition of Black Antifascism, highlights prominent Black Antifascists like Aimé Césaire and George Jackson, and recovers lesser-known critics of Anti-Black Fascism like Thyra Edwards and Lorenzo Kom’boa Irvin. In doing so, it not only makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Black radical tradition (or the Tradition of Radical Blackness), but also paves the way for deeper and more serious study of antifascisms emanating from Black realities. In our current moment of naked acts of genocide, intensified racialized police and military violence, and the bold resurgence of rightwing authoritarianism, Hope and Mullen, and the freedom fighters they examine, remind us of the long and rich praxis of resistance on which we can—and must—build. Everything is at stake."
—Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States and co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing
"In The Black Antifascist Tradition, Hope and Mullen unearth a distinct and underacknowledged lineage of Black antifascist organizing, from Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the anti-lynching movement to Black Lives Matter and the struggle for police abolition. Drawing on the contributions of past and present thinkers and activists, this book offers an essential overview of the ways that Black radicals have understood the relationship between fascism and white supremacy and organized to confront both. The book introduces readers to a history of Black internationalist and antifascist organizing, including lesser-known campaigns by Black soldiers during the Spanish Civil War and the Black Panther Party’s United Front Against Fascism. In so doing, the authors raise provocative arguments about the existential violence Black people experience even under 'normal' conditions of capitalist exploitation, underscoring the role of anti-Black racism in anticipating the rise of fascism long before its formal ascent to power. Importantly, Hope and Mullen show how resisting the conditions that threaten Black life in particular has produced strategies that are equally relevant to struggles against violent, anti-democratic movements everywhere. By broadening our horizons around what counts as antifascist organizing, The Black Antifascist Tradition insists on the inseparability of antifascism from the struggle for Black liberation."
"The Black Antifascist Tradition offers an indispensable framing that places Black experience at the center to show how anti-Blackness is inseparable from the development of US fascism, past and present. Through a crisp synthesis of essential writings by Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, William Patterson, Huey P. Newton, Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba, Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen make a compelling argument for reconceptualizing a race-based history of Black life through the lens of racialized fascism. An important read for anyone interested in understanding how we arrived at today’s US style of authoritarianism and state repression." —Diane Fujino, author, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
"From the sophisticated understanding of law as an agent of fascism articulated in the anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to the abolitionist theorization of fascism as both a theory of anti-Blackness and a structure of oppression by scholar-activists such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis; and with explorations of anti-colonialism, antiwar movements, and Black Power along the way, The Black Antifascist Tradition offers a careful history of Black thought and art by way of a celebration of the exquisite threads of antifascism woven inextricably into the Black Radical Tradition. Hope and Mullen detail the ways the Black Radical Tradition has not simply always been antifascist but that it has been powerfully, effectively, originally responsible for formulating antifascist analysis and strategy." —Micol Seigel, author, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police
"The Black Antifascist Tradition is a handbook a century in the making. It is a historical synthesis of how the forerunners of anti-colonial struggle, Pan-Africanism, and Black revolutionary theory and practice identified and confronted fascist emergence and organization from a local to an international scale and across the formative epochs. Richly detailed and thoroughly researched, this highly accessible and readable text is also wide-angled and multi-layered in scope--adeptly interconnecting people, places, events, and actions with their resultant insights, observations, and practical formulations. This book is the complete exposition of Black antifascist thought, and a necessary guide for the antifascist struggles of today." —Justin Akers Chacón, author, Radicals in the Barrio
"Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen have written the definitive history for one of the most important, and least discussed, pieces of the antifascist movement. Weaving together historical analysis, trenchant critique, and future visioning, this is one of the most important books on antifascism ever written." —Shane Burley, author, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
"The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition is a dazzling work of reclamation and admonition that simultaneously reaches into the folds of past and future to make an urgent, formidable case that fascism, capitalism, and anti-Black violence are profoundly interconnected. Hope and Mullen give voice to activists and intellectuals of two centuries with compelling clarity. They have produced a volume providing an astute and knowledgeable guide to a complex legacy with which every partisan of 'freedom dreams' needs to critically engage." —Alan Wald, author,Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade
"Through the dialectic of 'Anti-black Fascism' and the 'Black Antifascist Tradition,' Jeanelle Hope and Bill V. Mullen expertly convey how African descendant antifascists in the United States and beyond developed a unique interpretation of the fascist threat through their experience of, and fightback against, Jim Crow, Euro-American (settler) colonialism and imperialism, and policies and practices of white supremacy. A stunning work of historical recovery, political analysis, and critical interpretation, The Black Antifascist Tradition reads guerrilla intellectuals like Ida B. Wells and Ruth Wilson Gilmore into the tradition of Black Antifascism, highlights prominent Black Antifascists like Aimé Césaire and George Jackson, and recovers lesser-known critics of Anti-Black Fascism like Thyra Edwards and Lorenzo Kom’boa Irvin. In doing so, it not only makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Black radical tradition (or the Tradition of Radical Blackness), but also paves the way for deeper and more serious study of antifascisms emanating from Black realities. In our current moment of naked acts of genocide, intensified racialized police and military violence, and the bold resurgence of rightwing authoritarianism, Hope and Mullen, and the freedom fighters they examine, remind us of the long and rich praxis of resistance on which we can—and must—build. Everything is at stake."
—Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States and co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing
"In The Black Antifascist Tradition, Hope and Mullen unearth a distinct and underacknowledged lineage of Black antifascist organizing, from Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the anti-lynching movement to Black Lives Matter and the struggle for police abolition. Drawing on the contributions of past and present thinkers and activists, this book offers an essential overview of the ways that Black radicals have understood the relationship between fascism and white supremacy and organized to confront both. The book introduces readers to a history of Black internationalist and antifascist organizing, including lesser-known campaigns by Black soldiers during the Spanish Civil War and the Black Panther Party’s United Front Against Fascism. In so doing, the authors raise provocative arguments about the existential violence Black people experience even under 'normal' conditions of capitalist exploitation, underscoring the role of anti-Black racism in anticipating the rise of fascism long before its formal ascent to power. Importantly, Hope and Mullen show how resisting the conditions that threaten Black life in particular has produced strategies that are equally relevant to struggles against violent, anti-democratic movements everywhere. By broadening our horizons around what counts as antifascist organizing, The Black Antifascist Tradition insists on the inseparability of antifascism from the struggle for Black liberation."
--Haley Pessin, coeditor, Voices of a People's History of the United States in the Twenty-First Century
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jeanelle 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.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is a long-time activist and organizer. He is currently a member of the editorial collective for the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and is a co-founder of the Campus Antifascist Network. His other books include James Baldwin: Living in Fire, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Politics, Afro-Orientalism, and Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jeanelle 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.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is a long-time activist and organizer. He is currently a member of the editorial collective for the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and is a co-founder of the Campus Antifascist Network. His other books include James Baldwin: Living in Fire, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Politics, Afro-Orientalism, and Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
How anti-fascism is as American as apple pie
Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before “antifa” became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism into the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organizers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.
Spanning the 1930s to the present, this chronologically-arranged, primary source reader is made up of antifascist writings by Americans and by exiles in the US, some instantly recognizable, others long-forgotten. It also includes a sampling of influential writings from the US fascist, white nationalist, and proto-fascist traditions. Its contents, mostly written by people embedded in antifascist movements, include a number of pieces produced abroad that deeply influenced the US left. The collection thus places US antifascism in a global context.
Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before Antifa became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organisers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.
Spanning the 1930s to the present, this chronologically-arranged, primary source reader is made up of antifascist writings by Americans and by exiles in the US, some instantly recognizable, others long-forgotten. It also includes a sampling of influential writings from the US fascist, white nationalist, and proto-fascist traditions. Its contents, mostly written by people embedded in antifascist movements, include a number of pieces produced abroad that deeply influenced the US left. The collection thus places US antifascism in a global context.
REVIEWS:
“This is a crucial reader for our current political moment. It is a massive and rich archive, historicizing, theorizing, querying, and interrogating fascism in its many US varieties. This reader unearths and connects the anti-fascist responses in a plethora of sites—the Black Panthers and other anti-racist movements, LGBT pink triangle activists, and the Antifa. It will give you the knowledge to embolden yourself to resist and revolt.”
—Zillah Eisenstein, Anti-Racist Feminist Activist, Ithaca College
“Mullen and Vials cover an extraordinary range of sources—political, literary, sociological—from the fascists themselves, via liberal and business commentators, to the most committed of fascism’s opponents. This book is a treasure trove for anyone who wants to understand the tradition in which today’s antifascists stand.”
—David Renton, author of The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right
“In a remarkable feat of archival excavation, Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials have prepared a carefully compiled dossier to address fascism in the US in new and original ways. The result is a varied and vital collection—historically engaging and pressingly relevant—that tracks the arc of fascism and radical responses. The US Antifascism Reader brings the true stakes of this topic into focus. It’s a book I urge scholars and activists to obtain at once!”
Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before “antifa” became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism into the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organizers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.
Spanning the 1930s to the present, this chronologically-arranged, primary source reader is made up of antifascist writings by Americans and by exiles in the US, some instantly recognizable, others long-forgotten. It also includes a sampling of influential writings from the US fascist, white nationalist, and proto-fascist traditions. Its contents, mostly written by people embedded in antifascist movements, include a number of pieces produced abroad that deeply influenced the US left. The collection thus places US antifascism in a global context.
Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before Antifa became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organisers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.
Spanning the 1930s to the present, this chronologically-arranged, primary source reader is made up of antifascist writings by Americans and by exiles in the US, some instantly recognizable, others long-forgotten. It also includes a sampling of influential writings from the US fascist, white nationalist, and proto-fascist traditions. Its contents, mostly written by people embedded in antifascist movements, include a number of pieces produced abroad that deeply influenced the US left. The collection thus places US antifascism in a global context.
REVIEWS:
“This is a crucial reader for our current political moment. It is a massive and rich archive, historicizing, theorizing, querying, and interrogating fascism in its many US varieties. This reader unearths and connects the anti-fascist responses in a plethora of sites—the Black Panthers and other anti-racist movements, LGBT pink triangle activists, and the Antifa. It will give you the knowledge to embolden yourself to resist and revolt.”
—Zillah Eisenstein, Anti-Racist Feminist Activist, Ithaca College
“Mullen and Vials cover an extraordinary range of sources—political, literary, sociological—from the fascists themselves, via liberal and business commentators, to the most committed of fascism’s opponents. This book is a treasure trove for anyone who wants to understand the tradition in which today’s antifascists stand.”
—David Renton, author of The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right
“In a remarkable feat of archival excavation, Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials have prepared a carefully compiled dossier to address fascism in the US in new and original ways. The result is a varied and vital collection—historically engaging and pressingly relevant—that tracks the arc of fascism and radical responses. The US Antifascism Reader brings the true stakes of this topic into focus. It’s a book I urge scholars and activists to obtain at once!”
—Alan Wald, University of Michigan
“This volume should be read by everyone who thinks they know what fascism is, and everyone who does not, for it provides a rich and indispensable set of materials to give depth and meaning to the word ‘fascism,’ precisely when we need a comprehensive and varied archive to inform anti-fascist struggles. If you want to know what fascism has been and can be, read this book. We ignore it at our peril.”
—David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University
“Exceptionally well organized and presented.”
—Midwest Book Review
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Bill V. Mullen is Professor of American Studies at Purdue University. He is the author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire (forthcoming, Pluto Press); UnAmerican: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution and Afro-Orientalism. He is co-editor, with Ashley Dawson, of Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities. His articles have appeared in Social Text, African-American Review and American Quarterly. He is a member of the organizing collective of USACBI (US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) and a founding member of the Campus Antifascist Network.
Chris Vials is an Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2014) as well as numerous pieces on fascism and antifascism in the United States. He has appeared on CBC radio, PBS, and NPR to discuss the history of American fascist and antifascist movements. He is also co-founder of the Neighbor Fund, a non-profit devoted to legal defense for undocumented immigrants in Connecticut.
DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU
“What’s Past is Prologue…
"The most deadly, dangerous, and powerful enemy of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in general, Women in general, the poor in general, the working class in general, children in general, Freedom in general and Democracy in general in American society today is the truly heinous Republican Party and their endless number of severely bigoted and demagogic minions, mentors, sponsors, and supporters. Anyone who doesn't know or believes this blatantly obvious fact is not only a hopeless FOOL but ultimately deserves their "fate.”
—Kofi Natambu, July 15, 2009
"The Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history. 'Has there ever been an organisation in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organised human life on Earth?' Not that I'm aware of."
--Noam Chomsky, April 24, 2017
"Trump is not just an ethically dead aberration. Rather, he is the successor of a long line of fascists who shut down public debate, attempt to humiliate their opponents, endorse violence as a response to dissent and criticize any public display of democratic principles. The United States has reached its endpoint with Trump, and his presence should be viewed as a stern warning of the nightmare to come. Trump is not an isolated figure in US politics; he is simply the most visible and popular expression of a number of extremists in the Republican Party who now view democracy as a liability."
--Henry A. Giroux, "Fascism in Donald Trump's United States", December 8, 2015
"Like all fundamentally authoritarian and fascist expressions the political, social, economic, and cultural triumph of sheer hatred, greed, stupidity, cruelty, resentment, corruption, ignorance, paranoia, indifferance, psychosis, sadism, cowardice, hypocrisy, cultism, idolatry, and various forms of racial, gender, and class based violence promoted AS PUBLIC POLICY AND IDEOLOGICAL PLATFORM is what the Scumbag-in-Chief fully embodies and represents, and most importantly is what the great overwhelming majority of his over 63 million voters from 2016 most love, respect, encourage, endorse, and support about their very own national zombie cult "leader”. This is the clear and present danger on both an empirical and existential level that we are all up against and absolutely must defeat and remove from power in 2020 and beyond at all cost.”
—Kofi Natambu, December 22, 2019
IT IS TIME TO FACE REALITY:
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE 74 MILLION AMERICANS WHO ACTUALLY VOTED FOR A FASCIST FOR PRESIDENT AND THUS A FASCIST GOVERNMENT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN JUSTICE
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TRUTH
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN FACTS
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN THE CONSTITUTION
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN THE RULE OF LAW
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE 74 MILLION AMERICANS WHO VOTED IN 2020 FOR A FASCIST PRESIDENT AND THUS A FASCIST GOVERNMENT MEANS THAT EVERYTHING THEY STAND FOR, REPRESENT, AND EMBODY IS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THIS SOCIETY AND THE WORLD
https://refusefascism.org/2024/05/20/perspectives-on-stopping-fascism-in-the-us-in-2024/
Perspectives on Stopping Fascism in the US in 2024
May 20, 2024
by Refuse Fascism
Click Here To Listen On YouTube
This week Sam Goldman (@SamBGoldman) and Coco Das (@Coco_Das) have a wide ranging conversation with Dr. Clarence Lusane and Sunsara Taylor over what it will take to stop fascism in the United States. We discuss the 2024 elections in the context of the prospect of civil war, the genocide in Gaza and the uprising to stop it, the threat of today’s wars spiraling out of control, the nature of the fascist threat, and the possibility of wrenching a better future out of this moment.
Dr. Clarence Lusane is a political science professor and interim political science department chair at Howard University, and independent expert to the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance. HIs latest book is Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy. Read more from Dr. Lusane here
Sunsara Taylor (@SunsaraTaylor) is the co-host of the RNL (Revolution Nothing Less) Show on YouTube. She helped initiate Refuse Fascism in the aftermath of the election of Trump. Sunsara led tens of thousands into the streets against the overturn of Roe v Wade w/ RiseUp4AbortionRights.
“What’s Past is Prologue…"
https://truthout.org/.../trumpism-wont-be-defeated-in-a…/
Op-Ed
Politics & Elections
Trumpism Won’t Be Defeated in a Single Election Cycle
by Clarence Lusane
TomDispatch
November 29, 2022
Truthout
May 20, 2024
by Refuse Fascism
Click Here To Listen On YouTube
This week Sam Goldman (@SamBGoldman) and Coco Das (@Coco_Das) have a wide ranging conversation with Dr. Clarence Lusane and Sunsara Taylor over what it will take to stop fascism in the United States. We discuss the 2024 elections in the context of the prospect of civil war, the genocide in Gaza and the uprising to stop it, the threat of today’s wars spiraling out of control, the nature of the fascist threat, and the possibility of wrenching a better future out of this moment.
Dr. Clarence Lusane is a political science professor and interim political science department chair at Howard University, and independent expert to the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance. HIs latest book is Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy. Read more from Dr. Lusane here
Sunsara Taylor (@SunsaraTaylor) is the co-host of the RNL (Revolution Nothing Less) Show on YouTube. She helped initiate Refuse Fascism in the aftermath of the election of Trump. Sunsara led tens of thousands into the streets against the overturn of Roe v Wade w/ RiseUp4AbortionRights.
“What’s Past is Prologue…"
https://truthout.org/.../trumpism-wont-be-defeated-in-a…/
Op-Ed
Politics & Elections
Trumpism Won’t Be Defeated in a Single Election Cycle
by Clarence Lusane
TomDispatch
November 29, 2022
Truthout
PHOTO: A supporter wears a "Make America Great Again" hat at a rally for Oregon gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan on October 18, 2022, in Aurora, Oregon. Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / Getty Images
Just in case you didn’t notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation’s two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party-dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election. While voters did stop some of the most high-profile election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump true believers from taking office, all too many won seats at the congressional, state, and local levels.
Count on one thing: this movement isn’t going away. It won’t be defeated in a single election cycle and don’t think the authoritarian threat isn’t real either. After all, it now forms the basis for the politics of the Republican Party and so is targeting every facet of public life. No one committed to constitutional democracy should rest easy while the network of right-wing activists, funders, media, judges, and political leaders work so tirelessly to gain yet more power and implement a thoroughly undemocratic agenda.
This deeply rooted movement has surged from the margins of our political system to become the defining core of the GOP. In the post-World War II era, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964, from President Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, President Ronald Reagan, and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in its current Trumpian iteration, Republicans have long targeted democratic norms as impediments to establishing a neoliberal, race-based version of all-American authoritarianism. And that movement has been far too weakly opposed by far too many Democratic Party leaders and even some progressives. Don’t think of this phenomenon as right-wing conservativism either, but as a more dangerous, even violent movement whose ultimate aim is to overthrow liberal democracy. The American version of this type of electoral authoritarianism, anchored in Christian nationalist populism, has at its historic core a white nationalist pushback against the struggle for racial justice.
Liberal Democracy for Some, Racial Authoritarianism for Others
Liberal democracy had failed generations of African Americans and other people of color, as, of course, it did Native Americans massacred or driven from their ancestral lands. It failed African Americans and Latinos forced to work on chain gangs or lynched (without the perpetrators suffering the slightest punishment). It failed Asian Americans who were brutally sent to internment camps during World War II and Asians often explicitly excluded from immigration rosters.
The benefits of liberal democracy — rule of law, government accountability, the separation of powers, and the like — that were extended to most whites existed alongside a racial authoritarianism that denied fundamental rights and protections to tens of millions of Americans. The Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s defeated the longstanding, all-too-legal regime of racist segregationists and undemocratic, even if sometimes constitutional, authority. For the first time since the end of the Reconstruction era, when there was a concerted effort to extend voting rights, offer financial assistance, and create educational opportunities for those newly freed from slavery, it appeared that the nation was again ready to reckon with its racial past and present.
Yet, all too sadly, the proponents of autocratic governance did anything but disappear. In the twenty-first century, their efforts are manifest in the governing style and ethos of the Republican Party, its base, and the extremist organizations that go with it, as well as the far-right media, think tanks, and foundations that accompany them. At every level, from local school boards and city councils to Congress and the White House, authoritarianism and its obligatory racism continue to drive the GOP political agenda.
The violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, was just the high (or, depending on your views, low) point in a long-planned, multi-dimensional, hyper-conservative, white nationalist coup attempt engineered by President Donald Trump, his supporters, and members of the Republican Party. It was neither the beginning nor the end of that effort, just its most violent public expression — to date, at least. After all, Trump’s efforts to delegitimize elections were first put on display when he claimed that Barack Obama had actually lost the popular vote and so stolen the 2012 election, that it had all been a “total sham.”
During the 2016 presidential debates, Trump alone stated that he would not commit himself to support any other candidate as the party’s nominee, since — a recurring theme for him — he could only lose if the election were rigged or someone cheated. He correctly grasped that there would be no consequences to such norm-breaking behavior and falsely stated that he had only lost the Iowa caucus to Senator Ted Cruz because “he stole it.” After losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College in 2016, Trump incessantly complained that he would have won the popular vote, too, if the “millions” of illegal voters who cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton hadn’t been counted.
Donald Trump decisively lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, 74.2 million to 81.2 million in the popular vote and 232 to 306 in the Electoral College, leaving only one path to victory (other than insurrection) — finding a way to discount millions of black votes in key swing-state cities. From birtherism and Islamophobia to anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric, racism had propelled Trump’s ascendancy and his political future would be determined by the degree to which he and his allies could invalidate votes in the disproportionately Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, and Latino and Native American votes in Arizona and Nevada.
The GOP effort to disqualify Black, Latino, and Native American votes was a plot to create an illegitimate government, an unholy scheme that took an inescapably violent turn and led to an outcome for which the former president has yet to be held accountable. Sadly enough, the forces of authoritarianism were anything but dispatched by their defeat on January 6th. If anything, they were emboldened by the failure so far to hold responsible most of the agents who maneuvered the event into motion.
Democracy, Authoritarianism or Fascism?
The last decade has exposed a severely wounded American democratic experiment. Consider it Donald Trump’s contribution to have revealed how spectacularly the guardrails of liberal democracy can fail if the breaking of laws, rules, and norms goes unchallenged or is sacrificed on the altar of narrow political gains. The most mendacious, cruel, mentally unstable, thin-skinned, vengeful, incompetent, narcissistic, bigoted individual ever elected to the presidency was neither an accident, nor an aberration. He was the inevitable outcome of decades of Republican pandering to anti-democratic forces and white nationalist sentiments.
Scholars have long debated the distinction between fascism and authoritarianism. Fascist states create an all-engulfing power that rules over every facet of political and social life. Elections are abolished; mass arrests occur without habeas corpus; all opposition media are shut down; freedoms of speech and assembly are curtailed; courts, if allowed to exist at all, rubber-stamp undemocratic state policies; while the military or brown shirts of some sort enforce an unjust, arbitrary legal system. Political parties are outlawed and opponents are jailed, tortured, or killed. Political violence is normalized, or at least tolerated, by a significant portion of society. There is little pretense of constitutional adherence or the constitution is formally suspended.
On the other hand, authoritarian states acknowledge constitutional authority, even if they also regularly ignore it. Limited freedoms continue to exist. Elections are held, though generally with predetermined outcomes. Political enemies aren’t allowed to compete for power. Nationalist ideology diverts attention from the real levers and venues of that power. Political attacks against alien “others” are frequent, while public displays of racism and ethnocentrism are common. Most critically, some enjoy a degree of democratic norms while accepting that others are denied them completely. During the slave and Jim Crow eras in this country — periods of racial authoritarianism affecting millions of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans — most whites in the South (and perhaps a majority outside of it) either tolerated or embraced the disavowal of democracy.
Under the right confluence of forces — a weakened system of checks and balances, populist rhetoric that taps into fears and perceived injustices, an anemic and divided opposition, deep social or racial divides, distrust of science and scientists, rampant anti-intellectualism, unpunished corporate and political malfeasance, and popularly accepted charges of mainstream media bias — a true authoritarian could indeed come to power in this country. And as history has shown, that could just be a prelude to full-blown fascism.
The warning signs could not be clearer.
While, in many ways, Trump’s administration was more of a kakistocracy — that is, “government by the worst and most unscrupulous people,” as scholar Norm Ornstein put it — from day one to the last nano-seconds of its tenure, his autocratic tendencies were all too often on display. His authoritarian appetites generated an unprecedented library of books issuing distress signals about the dangers to come.
Timothy Snyder’s 2017 bestseller On Tyranny was, for instance, a brief but remarkably astute early work on the subject. The Yale history professor provided a striking overview of tyranny meant to dispel myths about how autocrats or populists come to and stay in power. Although published in 2017, the work made no mention of Donald Trump. It was, however, clearly addressing the rise to power of his MAGA right and soberly warning the nation to stop him before it was too late.
As Snyder wrote of the institutions of our democracy, they “do not protect themselves… The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions — even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” He particularly cautioned against efforts to link the police and military to partisan politics, as Trump first did in 2020 when his administration had peaceful protesters attacked by the police and National Guard in Lafayette Square across from the White House so that the president could take a stroll to a local church. He similarly warned about letting private security forces, often with violent tendencies (as when Trump’s security team would eject demonstrators from his political rallies) gain quasi-official or official status.
The period 2015 to 2020 certainly represented the MAGAfication of the United States and launched this country on a potential path toward future authoritarian rule by the GOP.
The Vulnerabilities of Democracy
Journalists have also been indispensable in exposing the democratic vulnerabilities of the United States. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen has, for instance, been prolific and laser-focused in calling out the hazards of creeping authoritarianism and of Trump’s “performing fascism.” She writes that while he may not himself have fully grasped the concept of fascism, “In his intuition, power is autocratic; it affirms the superiority of one nation and one race; it asserts total domination; and it mercilessly suppresses all opposition.”
While Trump is too lazy, self-interested, and intellectually undisciplined to be a coherent ideologue, he surrounded himself with and took counsel from those who were, including far-right zealots and Trump aides Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller. Bannon functioned as Trump’s Goebbels-ish propagandist, having cut his white nationalist teeth as founder and executive chair of the extremist Breitbart News media operation. In 2018, he told a gathering of European far-right politicians, fascists, and neo-Nazis, “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”
Someone who knows the former president better than most, his niece Mary Trump, all too tellingly wrote that her uncle “is an instinctive fascist who is limited by his inability to see beyond himself.” For her, there is no question the title fits. As she put it, “[A]rguing about whether or not to call Donald a fascist is the new version of the media’s years-long struggle to figure out if they should call his lies, lies. What’s more relevant now is whether the media — and the Democrats — will extend the label of fascism to the Republican Party itself.”
Mainstreaming Extremism and Democracy’s Decline
Given these developments, some scholars and researchers argue that the nation’s democratic descent may already have gone too far to be fully stopped. In its Democracy Report 2020: Autocratization Surges — Resistance Grows, the Varieties of Democracy (VDem) Project, which assesses the democratic health of nations globally, summarized the first three years of Trump’s presidency this way: “[Democracy] has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy.” Referring to its Liberal Democracy Index scale, it added, “The United States of America declines substantially on the LDI from 0.86 in 2010 to 0.73 in 2020, in part as a consequence of President Trump’s repeated attacks on the media, opposition politicians, and the substantial weakening of the legislature’s de facto checks and balances on executive power.”
These findings were echoed in The Global State of Democracy 2021, a report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance that argued, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”
The failure of Donald Trump’s eternally “stolen election” coup attempt and the presidency of Joe Biden may have put off the further development of an authoritarian state, but don’t be fooled. Neither the failure of the January 6th insurrection nor the disappointments suffered in the midterm elections have deterred the ambitions of the GOP’s fanatics. The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, however slim, will undoubtedly unleash a further tsunami of extremist actions not just against the Democrats, but the American people.
Purges of Democrats from House committees, McCarthyite-style hearings and investigations, and an all-out effort to rig the system to declare whoever emerges as the GOP’s 2024 presidential candidate the preemptive winner will mark their attempt to rule. Such actions will be duplicated — and worse — in states with Republican governors and legislatures, as officials there bend to the autocratic urges of their minority but fervent white base voters. They will be supported by a network of far-right media, donors, activists, and Trump-appointed judges and justices.
In response, defending the interests of working people, communities of color, LGBTQ individuals and families, and other vulnerable sectors of this society will mean alliances between progressives, liberals, and, in some instances, disaffected and distraught anti-Trump, pro-democracy Republicans. There are too many historical examples of authoritarian and fascist takeovers while the opposition remained split and in conflict not to form such political alliances. Nothing is more urgent at this moment than the complete political defeat of an anti-democratic movement that is, all too sadly, still on the march.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Clarence Lusane is the author of Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy.
Just in case you didn’t notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation’s two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party-dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election. While voters did stop some of the most high-profile election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump true believers from taking office, all too many won seats at the congressional, state, and local levels.
Count on one thing: this movement isn’t going away. It won’t be defeated in a single election cycle and don’t think the authoritarian threat isn’t real either. After all, it now forms the basis for the politics of the Republican Party and so is targeting every facet of public life. No one committed to constitutional democracy should rest easy while the network of right-wing activists, funders, media, judges, and political leaders work so tirelessly to gain yet more power and implement a thoroughly undemocratic agenda.
This deeply rooted movement has surged from the margins of our political system to become the defining core of the GOP. In the post-World War II era, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964, from President Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, President Ronald Reagan, and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in its current Trumpian iteration, Republicans have long targeted democratic norms as impediments to establishing a neoliberal, race-based version of all-American authoritarianism. And that movement has been far too weakly opposed by far too many Democratic Party leaders and even some progressives. Don’t think of this phenomenon as right-wing conservativism either, but as a more dangerous, even violent movement whose ultimate aim is to overthrow liberal democracy. The American version of this type of electoral authoritarianism, anchored in Christian nationalist populism, has at its historic core a white nationalist pushback against the struggle for racial justice.
Liberal Democracy for Some, Racial Authoritarianism for Others
Liberal democracy had failed generations of African Americans and other people of color, as, of course, it did Native Americans massacred or driven from their ancestral lands. It failed African Americans and Latinos forced to work on chain gangs or lynched (without the perpetrators suffering the slightest punishment). It failed Asian Americans who were brutally sent to internment camps during World War II and Asians often explicitly excluded from immigration rosters.
The benefits of liberal democracy — rule of law, government accountability, the separation of powers, and the like — that were extended to most whites existed alongside a racial authoritarianism that denied fundamental rights and protections to tens of millions of Americans. The Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s defeated the longstanding, all-too-legal regime of racist segregationists and undemocratic, even if sometimes constitutional, authority. For the first time since the end of the Reconstruction era, when there was a concerted effort to extend voting rights, offer financial assistance, and create educational opportunities for those newly freed from slavery, it appeared that the nation was again ready to reckon with its racial past and present.
Yet, all too sadly, the proponents of autocratic governance did anything but disappear. In the twenty-first century, their efforts are manifest in the governing style and ethos of the Republican Party, its base, and the extremist organizations that go with it, as well as the far-right media, think tanks, and foundations that accompany them. At every level, from local school boards and city councils to Congress and the White House, authoritarianism and its obligatory racism continue to drive the GOP political agenda.
The violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, was just the high (or, depending on your views, low) point in a long-planned, multi-dimensional, hyper-conservative, white nationalist coup attempt engineered by President Donald Trump, his supporters, and members of the Republican Party. It was neither the beginning nor the end of that effort, just its most violent public expression — to date, at least. After all, Trump’s efforts to delegitimize elections were first put on display when he claimed that Barack Obama had actually lost the popular vote and so stolen the 2012 election, that it had all been a “total sham.”
During the 2016 presidential debates, Trump alone stated that he would not commit himself to support any other candidate as the party’s nominee, since — a recurring theme for him — he could only lose if the election were rigged or someone cheated. He correctly grasped that there would be no consequences to such norm-breaking behavior and falsely stated that he had only lost the Iowa caucus to Senator Ted Cruz because “he stole it.” After losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College in 2016, Trump incessantly complained that he would have won the popular vote, too, if the “millions” of illegal voters who cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton hadn’t been counted.
Donald Trump decisively lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, 74.2 million to 81.2 million in the popular vote and 232 to 306 in the Electoral College, leaving only one path to victory (other than insurrection) — finding a way to discount millions of black votes in key swing-state cities. From birtherism and Islamophobia to anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric, racism had propelled Trump’s ascendancy and his political future would be determined by the degree to which he and his allies could invalidate votes in the disproportionately Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, and Latino and Native American votes in Arizona and Nevada.
The GOP effort to disqualify Black, Latino, and Native American votes was a plot to create an illegitimate government, an unholy scheme that took an inescapably violent turn and led to an outcome for which the former president has yet to be held accountable. Sadly enough, the forces of authoritarianism were anything but dispatched by their defeat on January 6th. If anything, they were emboldened by the failure so far to hold responsible most of the agents who maneuvered the event into motion.
Democracy, Authoritarianism or Fascism?
The last decade has exposed a severely wounded American democratic experiment. Consider it Donald Trump’s contribution to have revealed how spectacularly the guardrails of liberal democracy can fail if the breaking of laws, rules, and norms goes unchallenged or is sacrificed on the altar of narrow political gains. The most mendacious, cruel, mentally unstable, thin-skinned, vengeful, incompetent, narcissistic, bigoted individual ever elected to the presidency was neither an accident, nor an aberration. He was the inevitable outcome of decades of Republican pandering to anti-democratic forces and white nationalist sentiments.
Scholars have long debated the distinction between fascism and authoritarianism. Fascist states create an all-engulfing power that rules over every facet of political and social life. Elections are abolished; mass arrests occur without habeas corpus; all opposition media are shut down; freedoms of speech and assembly are curtailed; courts, if allowed to exist at all, rubber-stamp undemocratic state policies; while the military or brown shirts of some sort enforce an unjust, arbitrary legal system. Political parties are outlawed and opponents are jailed, tortured, or killed. Political violence is normalized, or at least tolerated, by a significant portion of society. There is little pretense of constitutional adherence or the constitution is formally suspended.
On the other hand, authoritarian states acknowledge constitutional authority, even if they also regularly ignore it. Limited freedoms continue to exist. Elections are held, though generally with predetermined outcomes. Political enemies aren’t allowed to compete for power. Nationalist ideology diverts attention from the real levers and venues of that power. Political attacks against alien “others” are frequent, while public displays of racism and ethnocentrism are common. Most critically, some enjoy a degree of democratic norms while accepting that others are denied them completely. During the slave and Jim Crow eras in this country — periods of racial authoritarianism affecting millions of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans — most whites in the South (and perhaps a majority outside of it) either tolerated or embraced the disavowal of democracy.
Under the right confluence of forces — a weakened system of checks and balances, populist rhetoric that taps into fears and perceived injustices, an anemic and divided opposition, deep social or racial divides, distrust of science and scientists, rampant anti-intellectualism, unpunished corporate and political malfeasance, and popularly accepted charges of mainstream media bias — a true authoritarian could indeed come to power in this country. And as history has shown, that could just be a prelude to full-blown fascism.
The warning signs could not be clearer.
While, in many ways, Trump’s administration was more of a kakistocracy — that is, “government by the worst and most unscrupulous people,” as scholar Norm Ornstein put it — from day one to the last nano-seconds of its tenure, his autocratic tendencies were all too often on display. His authoritarian appetites generated an unprecedented library of books issuing distress signals about the dangers to come.
Timothy Snyder’s 2017 bestseller On Tyranny was, for instance, a brief but remarkably astute early work on the subject. The Yale history professor provided a striking overview of tyranny meant to dispel myths about how autocrats or populists come to and stay in power. Although published in 2017, the work made no mention of Donald Trump. It was, however, clearly addressing the rise to power of his MAGA right and soberly warning the nation to stop him before it was too late.
As Snyder wrote of the institutions of our democracy, they “do not protect themselves… The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions — even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” He particularly cautioned against efforts to link the police and military to partisan politics, as Trump first did in 2020 when his administration had peaceful protesters attacked by the police and National Guard in Lafayette Square across from the White House so that the president could take a stroll to a local church. He similarly warned about letting private security forces, often with violent tendencies (as when Trump’s security team would eject demonstrators from his political rallies) gain quasi-official or official status.
The period 2015 to 2020 certainly represented the MAGAfication of the United States and launched this country on a potential path toward future authoritarian rule by the GOP.
The Vulnerabilities of Democracy
Journalists have also been indispensable in exposing the democratic vulnerabilities of the United States. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen has, for instance, been prolific and laser-focused in calling out the hazards of creeping authoritarianism and of Trump’s “performing fascism.” She writes that while he may not himself have fully grasped the concept of fascism, “In his intuition, power is autocratic; it affirms the superiority of one nation and one race; it asserts total domination; and it mercilessly suppresses all opposition.”
While Trump is too lazy, self-interested, and intellectually undisciplined to be a coherent ideologue, he surrounded himself with and took counsel from those who were, including far-right zealots and Trump aides Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller. Bannon functioned as Trump’s Goebbels-ish propagandist, having cut his white nationalist teeth as founder and executive chair of the extremist Breitbart News media operation. In 2018, he told a gathering of European far-right politicians, fascists, and neo-Nazis, “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”
Someone who knows the former president better than most, his niece Mary Trump, all too tellingly wrote that her uncle “is an instinctive fascist who is limited by his inability to see beyond himself.” For her, there is no question the title fits. As she put it, “[A]rguing about whether or not to call Donald a fascist is the new version of the media’s years-long struggle to figure out if they should call his lies, lies. What’s more relevant now is whether the media — and the Democrats — will extend the label of fascism to the Republican Party itself.”
Mainstreaming Extremism and Democracy’s Decline
Given these developments, some scholars and researchers argue that the nation’s democratic descent may already have gone too far to be fully stopped. In its Democracy Report 2020: Autocratization Surges — Resistance Grows, the Varieties of Democracy (VDem) Project, which assesses the democratic health of nations globally, summarized the first three years of Trump’s presidency this way: “[Democracy] has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy.” Referring to its Liberal Democracy Index scale, it added, “The United States of America declines substantially on the LDI from 0.86 in 2010 to 0.73 in 2020, in part as a consequence of President Trump’s repeated attacks on the media, opposition politicians, and the substantial weakening of the legislature’s de facto checks and balances on executive power.”
These findings were echoed in The Global State of Democracy 2021, a report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance that argued, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”
The failure of Donald Trump’s eternally “stolen election” coup attempt and the presidency of Joe Biden may have put off the further development of an authoritarian state, but don’t be fooled. Neither the failure of the January 6th insurrection nor the disappointments suffered in the midterm elections have deterred the ambitions of the GOP’s fanatics. The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, however slim, will undoubtedly unleash a further tsunami of extremist actions not just against the Democrats, but the American people.
Purges of Democrats from House committees, McCarthyite-style hearings and investigations, and an all-out effort to rig the system to declare whoever emerges as the GOP’s 2024 presidential candidate the preemptive winner will mark their attempt to rule. Such actions will be duplicated — and worse — in states with Republican governors and legislatures, as officials there bend to the autocratic urges of their minority but fervent white base voters. They will be supported by a network of far-right media, donors, activists, and Trump-appointed judges and justices.
In response, defending the interests of working people, communities of color, LGBTQ individuals and families, and other vulnerable sectors of this society will mean alliances between progressives, liberals, and, in some instances, disaffected and distraught anti-Trump, pro-democracy Republicans. There are too many historical examples of authoritarian and fascist takeovers while the opposition remained split and in conflict not to form such political alliances. Nothing is more urgent at this moment than the complete political defeat of an anti-democratic movement that is, all too sadly, still on the march.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Clarence Lusane is the author of Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy.
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2023/12/malcolm-x-black-radical-tradition-human.html
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on December 24, 2023):
Sunday, December 24, 2023
Malcolm X, the Black Radical Tradition, Human Rights, The Necessity of Resistance, and the Arduous Struggle of Palestinians in Gaza For Liberation From Massive State Violence Inflicted by Israel and the United States
https://truthout.org/articles/what-would-malcolm-x-say-about-gaza-and-black-resistance-in-the-us-today/
Interview
Racial Justice
What Would Malcolm X Say About Gaza and Black Resistance in the US Today?
Scholar Michael Sawyer brings the political philosophy of Malcolm X to bear on the horrors taking place in Gaza.
by George Yancy
December 23, 2023
Truthout
Malcolm X pictured on March 1, 1964.
Truman Moore / Getty Images
In deep times of sorrow and catastrophe, some of us flee. We flee either because we don’t want to face the weight and ugliness of the horror — willed ignorance — or we flee because we need a reprieve. I find myself needing a reprieve, though I’m by no means beyond the trappings of the former. There are other times when I seek out the wisdom of those human beings who refused to turn their faces from forms of social terror and found strength to endure. Think here of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her powerful fight against the lynching of Black people as forms of white, twisted desire and an attempt to control Black freedom.
I recall as a teenager lying back on the floor listening to Malcolm X speeches on vinyl records that my father had collected. Malcolm X’s powerful and articulate voice encouraged me to read the dictionary, to embody the sting of his discourse, the truth that he spoke. I wanted to be like Malcolm X. I didn’t want to be a milquetoast person afraid to speak the truth. Many years later, I would read as much as I could get my hands on by and about Malcolm X. I found that many people were more interested in donning the X as opposed to understanding the complexity of the man. In 1991, I had the good fortune to meet Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz, who also happily signed my copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I also had the deep honor of meeting Malcolm’s youngest brother, Robert Little, in 1993. He and I spent deep quality time discussing Malcolm.
As I was thinking about the horrors taking place in Gaza, the Black Lives Matter movement, and so much more, I thought of Malcolm, his wisdom and his indefatigable courage. Wondering what Malcolm thought about the crucible of this moment, while understanding the potential mistakes involved in presentism, or where we judge the past using dominant attitudes from the present, I turned to scholar Michael Sawyer. Sawyer is an associate professor of African American Literature and Culture, a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the author of the groundbreaking book, Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X. We discussed what Malcolm X means to us today and why his thought continues to be powerfully germane. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
George Yancy: When I say the name of Malcolm X (who later took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) in the context of the college classroom, I find that many students mistakenly associate him with advocacy for wanton violence. But in Malcolm X Speaks (edited by George Breitman), Malcolm X is clear about how he understands violence. He says, “I have never advocated any violence. I have only said that Black people who are the victims of organized violence perpetrated upon us by the Klan, the Citizens’ Councils, and many other forms, should defend ourselves. And when I say we should defend ourselves against the violence of others, they use their press skillfully to make the world think that I am calling for violence, period.” Black self-defense — to take a stand against Black brutalization and oppression — for Malcolm X, is not the same as white terrorism, which is predicated upon the hatred of Black people, their dehumanization and disposability. Malcolm X reminds me of the distinction made between terrorism and the collective struggle against oppression maintained by the Palestinian American activist and scholar Edward Said.
Said is clear that terrorism or the emphasis on armed struggle that is indiscriminate and “sometimes foolishly and in a political sense stupidly relied on” is unacceptable. Said would not accept the killing of innocent civilians. But he was supportive of the struggle against oppression. It is not lost on me that Patrick Henry, who was one of the “founding fathers” of the United States and a famous orator, was against the hegemonic British rule over the American colonies. Indeed, he is known as saying, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” I imagine that the Black people that he enslaved would have been killed had they made such a fiery and insurrectionist claim against slavery and their so-called white masters. That brings me to my main question. Black people continue to live under conditions of anti-Black racism. Yet, when we resist, we are seen as violent. We can’t fight against anti-Blackness in the name of liberty where this might mean deciding to die in the process.
Talk about how Malcolm X would frame the contradictions that I’m suggesting. How might he propose that we collectively think about resisting anti-Black racism in the U.S. in the 21st century? And how might he propose Black people support other collective groups that have been negatively racialized and othered under colonial and oppressive conditions? I’m thinking here specifically of Palestinians. Malcolm X was critical of the dispossession of Palestinians, writing: “Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the ‘religious’ claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a Moroccan nation where Spain used to be, as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?”
Michael E. Sawyer: First, George, I want to thank you for the opportunity to be in dialogue with you on this platform, especially as we prepare for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Malcolm X on May 19, 2024. The thrust of your question is timely and provocative in that it deals with the unspeakable violence we are all witness to in the conflict between Israel and putatively Hamas. I say putatively because the carnage we have witnessed is, in toto, skewed towards those we understand to be non-combatants. As we situate ourselves to deal with this question through the thinking of Malcolm X, we will have to develop some abstract understandings of several terms: violence vs. nonviolence, resistance, and something that approximates the right (or perhaps the necessity) to resist regimes of oppression, whether they be state-sanctioned or not.
Abstractly, Malcolm X insists upon a very careful, what I will call a “distinct-indistinction,” between violence and nonviolence as forms of resistance on the part of oppressed subjects. Broadly, he forces us to realize that as far as systems of power are concerned, any activity that is designed to destabilize structures of power are deemed “violent.” Meaning that all technologies of resistance — say, for instance, speech acts against a regime — are reacted to, or at least categorized, in the same manner as an armed insurgency. This means that as a practical matter, the telos [or end goal] of any form of protest — let’s use the term “disruptive activity” — will almost universally first be characterized as violent and then reacted to in violent fashion. That is, the abstraction I referenced above that needs to be further glossed as also distinct from acts of self-defense against violence which Malcolm X understands as required to be violent. That abstraction allows us to deal with the specificity of your question that I take to situate, and I believe this to be correct, the plight of Palestinians as inextricably related to the denial of liberty to Black people in this country.
That linkage is, in my estimation, one of the foundational advances provided by the philosophical system (if you will allow me that) Malcolm X developed in that he understands “Black” to reference aggrieved subjects wherever and whoever they might be; a form of global transnational and trans-subjective Blackness. What that means, returning to the abstraction developed above, is that resistance to the occupation of Gaza or the West Bank by anyone will necessarily be seen as violent by the state of Israel. And I want to take care to acknowledge that there are actors within that government who do not subscribe to this view, and are reacted to violently. That means that a terror attack like that on October 7 by Hamas and others will be understood as a kind of capstone in a logic of violence, whether individual acts in that chain of events can be characterized as violent or not.
What this seems to assert is that the answer to the totality of your question regarding what is to be done to effectively oppose systems of state-sanctioned oppression is to mount a structural/systemic response to the structural/systemic refraction of all protest into acts of violence that necessarily tend to blur and, at the same time, magnify actual acts of violence. What Malcolm X endeavors to do through his transnational and trans-subjective understanding of Black(ness) was to create a type of super-citizenship that enjoyed the protection of recognized states for those situated within crucibles of oppression wherever that might be. This becomes Black Panther Party orthodoxy in that oppressed African Americans were deemed to be substantively existing in colonies and therefore colonized. Here, “super” is in great measure meant to be something like “greater than” but also shorthand for “superseding” in that it is an overarching understanding that invalidates typologies of citizenship that are designed only to render subjects objects in terms of the law: acted upon rather than protected by. This would be the kinetic realization of the dormant or potential power of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other prohibitions against apartheid, etc. Aggrieved parties would have the ability, or more accurately already be understood to be protected and if necessary, dynamically so by international peace-keepers dedicated to a realization of the term “liberty” that hovers over this discussion. We are disconcertingly far from realizing that goal.
Part of how I think about anti-Black racism is through the lens of white supremacy, though I don’t limit my understanding of anti-Blackness to white groups such as Christian Identity, neo-Nazis or “alt-right” Republicans. Whiteness is not limited to overt hatred or conscious racial discrimination or the use of the N-word. White hegemony, white power and white privilege are systemic. Even poor white people get to benefit ontologically from being racially defined as white. In fact, to define white supremacy exclusively in terms of white hatred would exclude those white people who continue to reap the benefits from a system that dehumanizes Black people and other racially minoritized people. Whiteness functions to conceal its power through mundane processes that are structured as “normal.” To challenge white supremacy, one has to challenge the commonplace ways in which whiteness continues to operate and accrue a sense of safety for white people — being able to drive while white and feel no anxiety about being pulled over because one is white, shopping while white and not being racially profiled, and never needing to teach one’s white children about how to behave in the presence of police officers for fear that one is immediately suspected of being a “criminal.” As white educator Peggy McIntosh says, “In my class and place, I did not see myself as racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.”
I find that when my white students discuss white supremacy, they limit their critiques to forms of discrete hatred or meanness. Encouraging them to rethink white supremacy through a systemic lens, where anti-Blackness is indissociable from whiteness as a structure, they become almost nihilistic or fatalistic, which is never my aim. I do want them to lean into the conundrum of what it means to be white and yet ethical under a system of anti-Blackness where they are complicit. That is crucial. For me, to undo the system of white supremacy would entail undoing whiteness as a site of hegemony and privilege.
On March 19, 1964, Black jazz critic A. B. Spellman asked Malcolm X about his use of the term “revolution” and if such a thing was occurring in the U.S. at that time. Malcolm X responded, “There hasn’t been. The people who are involved in a revolution don’t become a part of the system — they destroy the system; they change the system. The genuine word for a revolution is Umwälzung which means a complete overturning and a complete change.” As we grapple with white supremacy at this moment in the U.S., especially in terms of the unabashed white nationalist ethos that Donald Trump has explicitly galvanized, how might the words of Malcolm X instigate more radical thinking amongst white people themselves in terms of what it would take to rid the U.S. or even the world of white supremacy? What would Malcolm X require of white people when it comes to radically undoing/overthrowing the system that underwrites their whiteness; indeed, white ontology?
As I mention in my book, Black Minded, which is the impetus for this discussion, for Malcolm X, all roads lead to revolution. What this requires is that the spirit of your insightful reference to Malcolm X’s use of the term Umwälzungbe unpacked. We first must disabuse ourselves of the predisposition to characterize all forms of disruption as revolutionary or revolution. So, to situate revolution as the genus of radical activity rather than a species of it is to make a categorical error that comes with dire consequences.
Briefly, if you think of a Lamborghini as the genus of car rather than a species of car, at least two bad things can happen. First, you won’t recognize other cars, or second, you might expect all things called “cars” to perform like Lamborghinis. So, if I think that all modalities of radicalism or radical activity — or perhaps more accurately, forms of disruption — are revolutionary, then I can miss things that don’t look like what I require them to look like that are in fact revolutionary and/or expect things like demonstrations to perform like revolution. Circling back and refining what I said about Malcolm X understanding all roads to lead to revolution is to understand just that. The road from Chicago to LA isn’t in LA when you first pull onto Route 66. There are miles to cover and things that have to happen and you may not make it, but these are steps in a particular direction. Any step toward the telos of revolution is understood to always already be revolutionary or violent and is thus obstructed. All of this is ably though incompletely taken up in Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche, which basically asserts that a preoccupation with a romanticized understanding of the French Revolution makes it impossible for us, in the aftermath of that chaos, to accurately characterize acts of protest against structured power; and here I want “characterize” to do a lot of work. I need it to mean the ability to properly plan, execute, witness, categorize and manage expectations. So, to me, what Malcolm X is saying is: Don’t expect a demonstration to upend a system and don’t be surprised when an actual act of revolution causes complete upheaval, which may not necessarily be what people are hoping for: colloquially, everyone wants to have a revolution, but nobody wants to clean up afterwards.
So, getting back to where you started, what you are describing to me with respect to students’ disaggregating commonplace complicity with white supremacy and anti-Blackness as unrelated from more dynamic forms of racial hatred is the result of another categorical error. So, if we understand whiteness and everything that comes with it as the genus, complicity with those benefits as well as actively functioning as a racist are species of whiteness that can be interrogated separately but understood to be related to one another in that whiteness understood in this fashion is the threshold condition for things that fall under it and to your point “where anti-Blackness is indissociable from whiteness as a structure.”
To get to the closing moments of this question, which is what needs to be done to begin to develop a program for the eradication of white supremacy globally, would first require that we have an informed reexamination of events. I mean something as basic as perhaps being willing to understand that the American Revolution was not a revolution, but rather something that approximates a civil war that was predicated upon refining the functioning of white supremacy outside of continental Europe. That continued with the Civil War in the 19th century, and Trumpism represents an attempt to revitalize essential elements of that practice that had been suppressed in the late 20th century. This reasserts that anti-Blackness that begins as chattel slavery and reverberates and evolves is the engine of white supremacy. To dismantle or render inoperative anti-Blackness would impair white supremacy. What that means is that white people must necessarily be willing to address the genus of whiteness that would be evacuated of its force by actively first understanding something as basic as that Black people exist outside of the necessity of what Toni Morrison understands as the “white gaze.”
Malcolm X also said that “the Negro Revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system that it has condemned to accept them into their system.” While I don’t see myself as a revolutionary (unless to be a revolutionary means that I am prepared to fight for love of the whole of humanity and the Earth), how might we as Black academics rethink ways in which we uncritically accept aspects of the system of white racial capitalism? For example, as professors, how might we change the system when we are in many ways part of the professional managerial class? I’m trying to be honest here, taking Malcolm X at his word.
This formulation on the part of Malcolm X that refines the term “Revolution” with the modifier “Negro” is, in many ways, Malcolm X at his best. I say that to mean the way Malcolm turns to Black people and endeavors for us to redefine ourselves as the first step toward something that I want to call Self-Authorized Blackness. Malcolm X understands the term Negro to be more than pejorative but to represent the verbalization of the debasement of Black identity that unmoors it from referents that aren’t dictated by white supremacy. You see this most exemplified by his refusal in multiple public forums to allow white people to force him to utter what he understood as his “slave name.” That’s something that Negros do, not Black People, and as a necessary product of that claim, revolution that seeks to find subjects welcomed by the very system that made the revolution necessary in the first place is a waste of time, and worse, tends to reify the problem. So, to get at your really difficult question, what we need to do as Black academics as distinct from what Malcolm X would pejoratively understand as Negro academics is to exhibit the type of bravery, intellectual and otherwise, that he exemplified. That means — and this is to mechanically adopt everything we have been talking about here — calling things what they are, and in so doing, having the proper expectations for them. For me, that means the work we do within the structure of the university itself that I’m using as a master signifier for the business of Western thought, not necessarily the substance of it, can be disruptive, demonstrative and provocative, but probably not revolutionary. I don’t think it’s an accident that so many important movements begin on campuses and then find themselves facing outward but never forgetting that beginning. I think that it is incumbent upon actors within the academy who are serious about the kind of disruption we are understanding Malcolm X to be demanding of us to be diligent about maintaining a relationship to what I want to call The Black Commons. Not as a hierarchical referent but to understand that space as the place where the theory of revolutionary disruption of the status quo can be put into practice.
Malcolm X stressed the importance of the necessity of Black people loving themselves. He understood the importance of the complex and toxic ways in which Black people had internalized what I have theorized as the white gaze. It is a gaze that is part of a larger epistemic structure that refuses to see Black people as human and deserving of respect. His love for Black people didn’t just end after he parted ways with the Nation of Islam. He continued to teach Black people the importance of decolonizing their minds, of freeing themselves from the lies and myths that were designed to keep them oppressed. Philosophically, Malcolm X emphasized a counter-narrative that uplifts Black dignity and Black existential and cultural vibrancy. He spoke unambiguously about the ineradicable value of Black life. Malcolm X’s message predates the contemporary manifestation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In what ways do you see Malcolm X’s political and cultural philosophy as a precursor to BLM?
Ishmael Reed, during an event memorializing Max Roach’s We Insist!: Freedom Now Suite at Harlem Stage, proposed that Black Studies became necessary in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X. I don’t disagree with that, but want to use your question to further pull that thread and say that the mirror that Malcolm X held up to the world generally and Black folks in particular was meant to position us to study Blackness from a perspective of the kind of love you are drawing our attention to with this question. I think your marshaling of your theorization of the white gaze resonates with what I gestured at with bringing Morrison to the conversation. What I mean by putting you in conversation with Morrison and Malcolm X is to propose that the eradication of the white gaze is to resolve the deleterious effects of the misapprehension of true identity (self-consciousness) that W. E. B. Du Bois begins with when he insists that double consciousness “…only lets [Black people] see [themselves] through the revelation of the other world.” Malcolm, Morrison and you want to do (when I say “do” I mean “be” in the philosophical sense of “Being”) different. When I say different, I mean to move beyond a definition of Being that has been hijacked by white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Instead, the three of you start from a perspective of Love for Black people rather than hate.
This is important for a bunch of reasons, but significantly I want to lean into the notion of Malcolm X as beginning and ending with Love to deal with the misapprehension of him as angry and violent; a minister of hate as he was often labeled. To Love Black People in the context of negatively framed Blackness in what I have called the coercive crucible of white supremacy and anti-Blackness is disruptive and deemed violent. This is why the concept of Black Life “Mattering” was met at best with derision and at worst with violence. That is the substance, violence, of the Blue Lives Matter response to the slogan Black Lives Matter. It’s a threat, and one that has to be taken seriously in that it isn’t a meta threat but a physical one. So, in the same way that Reed sees Malcolm X’s death as the necessary and sufficient catalyst for Black Studies, I would propose that his notion of Black Love for the Black Self is the framework upon which BLM, the concept, hangs. Malcolm’s call to love your Black self is necessarily a presupposition of the fact that Black people matter in positive ways and not to matter in only being demonstrated to not matter, resonating with Giorgio Agamben’s consideration of the homo sacer.
What becomes clear to me is that Malcolm X’s aim — which was certainly impacted by the teachings of the honorable Elijah Muhammad — was to rethink the semiotics of Blackness, to rethink the political, economic and ideological rendering of the Black body as slavish. In a talk that Malcolm X gave at the University of Ghana on May 13, 1964, he said, “Either you are a citizen or you are not a citizen at all. If you are a citizen, you are free; if you are not a citizen, you are a slave.” As I thought about this quote, I wondered what Malcolm X would think about Afropessimism. Despite the power of his message, its legacy, it is certainly clear that many Black people continue to doubt their status as “citizens” given the continued anti-Black practices within the U.S. Clearly, George Floyd died at the hands of an empire that regards Black life on the cheap. Black people continue to be exposed to gratuitous violence, are subjected to general dishonor, and their children are taken from them through so many death-dealing ways (shot and murdered unarmed, incarcerated, rendered abject through medical racism and child welfare). How might Malcolm X sustain a conceptualization of Blackness as freedom through such pervasive anti-Black hydraulics, especially given the challenging and powerful claim articulated by scholar Frank Wilderson that “Blackness is coterminous with slaveness.”
I want to begin at the end of your question with Professor Wilderson’s assertion that “Blackness is coterminous with slaveness.” I really need to gloss this, and I want to do that through everything we have been saying about Malcolm X’s love for Black people and being Black. If by that assertion, Wilderson means that Blackness as framed by white supremacy — and here I’m thinking of what Du Bois says about the inability to know the self when viewing the self through the framework of those dedicated to your destruction — then I would agree that Blackness as such under those conditions can appear to be coterminous with slaveness. I believe Malcolm X and I also want to do something different and say that what I would call Negatively Framed Blackness is conterminous with “slaveness” and Blackness qua Blackness is the interruption of that binary without the necessity of dialectical interaction. This is the mirror that Malcolm holds up for the use of Black people. A mirror that allows self-reflection and authorization that meets that Black subject at the point of their own positive eruption that happens beyond the boundary of, back to your term, the white gaze. I agree with Wilderson in that so long as we countenance the capturing of important terms like Being, Subject, Human, Ontology, etc. by white supremacists, then we are indeed trapped in that semiotic funhouse. This is the rethinking of semiotics of Blackness that you put into play. This is the substance of your provocation in the question above that deals with the difference between Negro Revolution and Black Revolution.
I would say that for me, participating in a linguistic regime that refuses the existence of Blackness as a positive vibration is to accept the totalizing nature of the system of white supremacy and I refuse that. I insist that there was Blackness as a positive way of Being before the Middle Passage and Malcolm X’s loving on Black people in order to insist on us loving ourselves is Black Revolution then, now, and in the future. I love the phrase “pervasive anti-Black hydraulics” because it speaks to the mechanical way I see the world, and linguistically insists that there is a pervasive Black hydraulic pulsing away that, again, I want to assert is not designed, constructed, operated or maintained in dialectical congress with white supremacy or anti-Blackness.
To that end — and this is a part of your question I don’t want to miss dealing with — I think Malcolm X would see Afropessimism as an essential step in the long march toward the type of Revolutionary Blackness he insists upon that is not preoccupied with but fully aware of the framework that discourse so accurately maps. I don’t believe that Negatively Framed Blackness or Negative Black Being is either ontologically or the telos of Blackness, and I don’t want to have that sound Pollyannaish but rather a position of aspiration informed by the dogged durability of Black people under the dire conditions of threat that you have referenced here. That’s why I get up in the morning. To me, that is why you put in the effort to produce these conversations and why I took the time to try to participate in a manner that is I hope useful. Thank you so much for this opportunity.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:
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 20 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.
