Interview
Racial Justice
Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s Not Enough to Abolish ICE — We Have to Abolish the Police
“What’s happening now has happened before,” Kelley said, underscoring the anti-Blackness foundational to US fascism.
by George Yancy
February 26, 2026
Truthout
Under Donald Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has started appearing ever more like a private militia, unleashing brutal violence against families and displaying sycophantic loyalty to Trump as he mandates the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants.
In the days since January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti and 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, it’s not surprising that ICE has begun drawing even more frequent comparison to Hitler’s fascist Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
As I’ve borne witness to these tragedies, I’ve often thought about how Black people meet this moment with an already-acute sense of what it means to live and die under the U.S.’s fascistic logics. For Black people, there were no killers in brown shirts, but there were plenty of killers in white sheets sanctioned through the support, encouragement, and participation of white law enforcement officers. The depth and complexity of what I’m feeling and thinking about this brutal historical resonance cries out for clarity and truth-telling. It is for this reason that I reached out to Robin D. G. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and author of several renowned books, including his newest and forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life.
George Yancy: Robin, it is always an honor. As you said to Amy Goodman, “Jim Crow itself is a system of fascism, when you think about the denial of basic rights for whole groups of people, the way in which race is operating as a kind of nationalism against some kind of enemy threat, the corralling of human beings in ghettos. I mean, this is what we’ve been facing for a long time.” The point here is that this isn’t new. And we mustn’t forget. In The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition,Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen write, “On December 17, 1951, the US Civil Rights Congress, headed by Communist attorney William Patterson, presented a 240-page petition to the United Nations general assembly, entitled ‘We Charge Genocide.’” The charge of genocide was necessary, as it continues to be, because of the terror of anti-Blackness in this country, a form of terror that renders Black life fundamentally precarious and vulnerable to the forces of gratuitous state violence. I often fail to find the discourse to frame the ongoing history of anti-Blackness in this country. We’re not just talking about anti-Black beliefs and attitudes; it’s anti-Black fascism. I would like for you to talk about how war is an apt concept for critically thinking about the meaning and reality of anti-Blackness in the past and in the present.
Robin D. G. Kelley: Absolutely! No question! Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism, which as you acknowledged, not only precedes the so-called “classical” fascism in Italy and Germany, but for Hitler and the Third Reich, a model for the racist and antisemitic Nuremberg laws. By the way, Robyn Maynard, a brilliant scholar/organizer, has an essay coming out in the Boston Review that maps out the history of anti-Blackness in U.S. immigration policies.
“Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism.”
To your question, there are so many examples. Beginning in the present, we must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population, Africans. It didn’t matter that the vast majority were U.S. citizens. Trump denigrated the entire community as “garbage” and declared: “I don’t want them in our country.” If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.
Let’s also remember that the core anti-immigrant dog whistle that both Trump and JD Vance exploited in the run-up to the elections targeted Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who had temporary protected status. The racist lies that Haitians were eating their (white) neighbors’ dogs (a literal dog whistle!) was strategic and, apparently, it worked.
“We must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’ in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population.”
But we can’t put all of this on Trump. Besides the long, long history of political, economic, military, and discursive war against the Haitian people, I can never erase the image of Haitian asylum seekers who had taken shelter under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, being violently herded and brutalized by ICE agents on horses, as if they were fugitive slaves. It was the Biden-Harris administration, let’s not forget, that denied Haitians asylum and deported them in record numbers. More Haitians were deported under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their first few weeks in office than under Trump during his entire first term. Now, some might argue that Biden and Harris expanded the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program, which grants “parole” to eligible migrants waiting for visas (dig the carceral language), but all this means is that they were granted temporary protections that forced them into low-wage, precarious work since their status was contingent on having a job, any job.
Let’s come back to the present. We all learned of the horrific murder of 43-year-old Keith Porter Jr. here in Southern California on New Year’s Eve. In case readers don’t know the story, Porter stepped outside his apartment and did what a lot of people do: fired off a few celebratory rounds from his rifle into the sky. Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent who had recently moved into the same complex, wasn’t having it, so he put on his tactical gear, grabbed his weapons, went outside without identifying himself, and fatally shot Porter. The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] officers dispatched to the scene never asked Palacios to surrender his weapon, never gave him a sobriety test, didn’t investigate anything, really. The Department of Homeland Security’s liar-in-chief, Tricia McLaughlin, spun the incident as a “brave officer” taking out an “active shooter” after an exchange of gunfire. It just wasn’t true; every eyewitness confirmed there was no “exchange” of fire or hostilities. It was murder.
“If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.”
This happened a week before Renee Nicole Good’s death, and yet Porter’s name is not mentioned among the martyrs of the anti-ICE resistance, except when Black folks complain about it. Not to take anything away from the extraordinary sacrifice made by Good and Pretti, but Porter was not white and he was not killed in the act of trying to stop ICE and protect his neighbors. Whereas Porter, much like George Floyd, was rendered a victim whose worthiness was constantly called into question, Good and Pretti were martyrs with whom it is impossible not to empathize.
Porter’s family and friends were pressed to do what Black families always do when they lose a loved one to state violence: reclaim his character by showing that he was a loving, doting father who called his mother every day, worked hard, and made everyone laugh. They had to make him human, to inform the (white) world that his life had as much value as that of Good and Pretti. It’s tired and should be unnecessary, and to her credit, even Renee Good’s sister, Annie Ganger, felt the need to remind people that the violence that took her sister’s life “isn’t new” and that it was unfair that “the way someone looks garners more or less attention. And I’m so sorry that this is the reality.” Meanwhile, the “brave” ICE agent (whose name the LAPD initially refused to release), it turned out, had a reputation for anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, [allegations of perpetrating] child abuse, and had once showed up at a youth sporting event armed.
“The movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional.”
The point I’m trying to make here isn’t simply that Keith Porter needs to be acknowledged but rather the violence that stole him from his family not only “isn’t new,” it is routine. As a Black man who was native to Compton, California, he had an invisible target on his back. He knew what it is like to live in a police state. Premature death at the hands of armed agents of the state is merely a hazard of being Black in America. This is why the movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional, insisting that they are part of a larger matrix of state violence encompassing all law enforcement and the military. It’s not enough to “abolish ICE”; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety. With regards to Keith Porter, of course randomly shooting a gun in the air is not safe and should not be permitted, but we have to address the reasons he even owns a gun. He and so many other folks like him just don’t feel safe, and U.S. settler culture is rooted in violence as a first response and guns as the chief instrument of violence. Police simply don’t help. Abolition requires changing the culture, not just eliminating the instruments of the culture.
Assuming that war is an apt concept, what does this mean in terms of how we ought to respond? I ask you this question with sincerity. There are those who will say, “Oh, Yancy must believe in armed struggle on the streets of America.” This would be a non sequitur. There is too much of my mother’s Christian sensibilities in me to hold this position. Indeed, I try, I struggle, to manifest agape (the sense of unconditional neighborly love) toward all human beings. But I love my children as you love your daughter. Indeed, for me, that love refuses a form of hospitality that facilitates their harm. I can’t possibly stand by when the Brownshirts come hammering at the door with fascistic bloodlust in their eyes. Here I’m reminded of Claude McKay’s poem, “If We Must Die.” Toward the end he writes:
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
I appreciate your invocation of Claude McKay. As you know, that poem is almost always cited as an expression of the so-called New Negro, the spirit of defiance that suddenly erupts in the wake of World War I and the “Red Summer” of 1919. But this is a misnomer since Black communities had been practicing armed self-defense since they were dragged to these shores. Armed self-defense is the tradition; nonviolent civil disobedience is the rupture, the break with the past. The historical record is clear and unambiguous, as we’ve seen in the writings (memoirs and scholarship) of Robert and Mabel Williams, Akinyele Umoja, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Kellie Carter Jackson, Lance Hill, Jasmin Young, Nicholas Johnson, Simon Wendt, and many others. These writers have shown us, time and time again, that African Americans have a very long and surprisingly successful tradition of armed self-defense against mob violence. Armed self-defense has saved countless lives.
“It’s not enough to ‘abolish ICE’; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety.”
To be fair, militant nonviolent civil disobedience also courageously faces “the murderous, cowardly pack” and is undeniably “fighting back.” But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first impulse to keep a pistol by his bedside during the Montgomery bus boycott to protect his family against organized, state-sanctioned mob violence made perfect sense. You can’t win the racist mob or the brownshirts over with love, certainly not in the midst of war. This is why I find those commercials featuring an ICE agent who comes home to his kids and has his conscience suddenly pricked by a child’s query so frustrating, naïve, and ineffectual. If conscience mattered, the faces and screams of the people they brutalized, the lives they took, and the loved ones who had to bear witness would have convinced most of these dudes to quit their jobs long ago.
This kind of terror is not new; ICE and Border Patrol agents have been behaving like this for decades. Stephen Miller didn’t have to tell them what to do. Restraint must come before reeducation and redemption, and imposing restraint is impossible without consequences and accountability. As Dr. King said repeatedly in various speeches, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”
War is certainly an apt concept here. It is how I frame the assault on Black people in my forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. As I write in the book, “Policing is war by another name…. Whether we call it a war on crime, a war on militants, a war on drugs, law enforcement at every level has turned many Black neighborhoods into killing fields and open-air prisons, stripping vulnerable residents of equal protection, habeas corpus, freedom of movement, even protection from torture.” But as the anthropologist Orisanmi Burton put it in his book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, this is not a war we chose. He refers to sites of incarceration as “sites of counter-war,” which can be extended to virtually all Black and Black-led resistance to injustice, mob rule, criminalization, state violence, exploitation, and the very conditions that make Black people vulnerable to premature death. This counter-war holds out the possibility of freeing everyone, including those recruited to maintain systems of domination.
That said, I think the debate over whether we’re ready to go to war is a false debate because we’re already at war. We were at war before Trump came into office, before the neoliberal turn, before Jim Crow, before all of that. It begins with the kidnapping and trafficking of our African ancestors, and the violent dispossession of our Indigenous ancestors. Both processes fall under the category of genocide. John Brown was right to call American slavery “a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion.” These wars are fundamentally about turning flesh and earth into property, and whole peoples into combatants and commodities.
“Revolutionary pessimism is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed ‘anticipatory optimism’ — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail.”
We have to consider the centuries of continuous, protracted war. Once we acknowledge the reality of protracted war and counter-war, then we have to stretch our definition of “armed struggle.” In this asymmetrical war, guns are not the only weapons. Arson has been a weapon of the enslaved in their own counter-war against Christians holding them in bondage. Minneapolis is where they burned down the police station. Civil resistance has taken on so many forms that don’t fall neatly under traditional categories of “violence” or nonviolence, and have revealed the wide arsenal of “arms” people have deployed in struggle.
Again, in Making a Killing, which is as much if not more about collective resistance (counter-war) than acts of state violence (war), I write about rebellion in Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, New York, and elsewhere, and building on the work of Akinyele Umoja, who wrote We Will Shoot Back, I chart the tradition of armed self-defense in Mississippi in light of the police-perpetrated killing of Jonathan Sanders in 2015. Once we acknowledge the long war and redefine armed struggle, we’ll recognize that we’re already in it. We have to figure out what to do, how to strategize, and what it means when casualties of war are white people — which, of course, is not a new thing. It’s a rare thing and ebbs and flows, depending on the extent to which white people see this as their fight.
Your book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination was published in 2002. That was 24 years ago. For many, it is no doubt hard to dream, and I mean this both literally and figuratively. There are times when I try to fall asleep at night and I become obsessed with a singular nightmare: the creation of private militias that have state approval to throw me in jail for writing something or for refusing to embrace Trump’s fascism or our having this discussion. I see hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity. I see so many people being disappeared. I see American-style gulags. I see the complete disregard and overthrow of the Constitution where there are no checks and balances, where there is no longer a two-party system, where due process is nonexistent, and there are literally no exits out of this country. I see my neighbor turning me in because I expressed hatred toward white supremacy and shouted, “Love First!” over “America First!” In this case, perhaps all of those who care about freedom, community, their neighbors, and the importance of democracy “will find out,” as Trump said about Chicago, “why it’s called the Department of WAR.” I believe in the power of movements, but Trump is malicious and I have no doubt that he would, if given the opportunity (perhaps I should say, when given the opportunity), unleash the full might of the Department of War on us. How do we continue to dream, Robin, to have freedom dreams, when the U.S. continues to amplify the reality of dystopic nightmares?
I feel you. I also know we’ve been through worse. A “private militia” (read: mob and police) with “state approval to throw me in jail for writing something” or challenging the status quo by, say, trying to vote, or “hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity,” and “American-style gulags” (keeping in mind how many gulags were actually modeled on U.S. convict labor camps) — and now we’re talking about Meridian, Mississippi (1871), Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), New Orleans, Louisiana (1900), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), Springfield, Illinois (1908), East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), Elaine, Arkansas (1919), and, as you and I discussed at length back in 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921).
We have been here. But I understand that to say what’s happening now has happened before, sometimes worse, gives us little comfort.
I do want to make a case for the value of “freedom dreams” in times like these. I’m always reminding readers that what I called the Black radical imagination is not wishful thinking, not an escape from reality, not some kind of dream state conjured and nurtured independent of the day-to-day struggles on the ground. The main point of the book is that the radical visions animating social movements are forged in collective resistance and a critical, clear-eyed analysis of the social order. In fact, in the 20th-anniversary edition which came out in 2022, I underscore this point, writing, “The book does not prioritize ‘freedom dreams’ to the exclusion of ‘fascist nightmares.’ If anything, I show that freedom dreams are born of fascist nightmares, or, better yet, born against fascist nightmares.” The context in which I wrote it, the early Bush years, was decidedly an era of dystopic nightmares: a wave of police killings, culminating in the massive response to the murder of Amadou Diallo, 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, accelerating neoliberalism, and so forth. Moreover, the movements I explore imagined freedom in the darkest of times: Black Exodus out of an Egyptland of lynching, disfranchisement, new forms of slavery, and segregation; Black embrace of socialist revolution at the height of fascism, global economic crisis, and anti-communism; and Black radical feminism in a moment of heightened sexual violence, femicide, carceral expansion, and an increasingly masculinist Black freedom movement.
In other words, all of these movements were fueled not by false optimism but by a deep understanding of the death-dealing structures of gendered racial capitalism. Freedom dreaming, as it were, is not a luxury; our survival as a people depends on envisioning a radically different future for all and fighting to bring it into existence. The fight or the struggle is precisely how visions of the future are forged, clarified, revised, or discarded.
I just mentioned the power of movements. Coming back to Freedom Dreams, you argue that that there is more that is needed to fight for freedom than organized protest, marches, sit-ins, strikes, and slowdowns. For you, surrealism is also necessary. You write, “Surrealism recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality (which is like rationalization, the same word they use for improving capitalist production and limiting people’s needs).” When I read that passage again, I thought of the power of poiesis — that sense of creation or that sense of bringing something that is radically new into being. Speak to how surrealism continues to inform your understanding of liberation and perhaps even hope amid so much fear, pain, anger, and perhaps, like for me, nightmarishness.
Really great question, one I continued to ponder after writing Freedom Dreams. A critical argument I make in that chapter and elsewhere is that the Africans across the diaspora had been practicing or living surrealism long before Europeans named it. I gave examples, one being the blues. I left it undeveloped in the book, but since then have been thinking about the blues alongside Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, the brilliant geographer Clyde Woods, and French surrealist whom I don’t mention in Freedom Dreams, Pierre Naville. The blues, not just as music but epistemology, can be defined as a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity — or, in your words, so much fear, pain, anger, and nightmarishness. True, rising nationalism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, neoliberalism, and the relative weakness of contemporary mass movements offers little reassurance that a liberated future is on the horizon. But the blues, as with the Black radical imagination, resists fatalism and inevitability. It demands and narrates action.
“We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders.”
This is where I find Pierre Naville helpful. A founding member of the Paris Surrealist group and one of the first to join the Communist Party, in 1926 he published a pamphlet titled “The Revolution and Intellectuals,” which argued, among other things, that pessimism was not a reason for despair, withdrawal, melancholy, or bitterness. What he called the “richness of a genuine pessimism” (which he traced to Hegel’s philosophy and “Marx’s revolutionary method”) requires action and must take political form. Naville’s revolutionary pessimism was a critique of the optimism of Stalinist assertions about the inevitable triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union and the imminent fall of capitalism. It was also a critique of the “shallow optimism” of social democrats who believed that they could eventually vote their way into creating a socialist commonwealth. His revolutionary pessimism was not fatalistic resignation or an obsession with the “decline” of elites or nations or Western civilization. Rather, it was a call for collective revolutionary action by, and on behalf of, the oppressed classes. Revolutions are not inevitable, nor do they correspond with particular objective conditions. People just don’t have the luxury to wait for the “right conditions.” Instead, movements must interrupt historical processes leading to catastrophe, by any means necessary. It is not enough to “hope,” we must be determined.
Revolutionary pessimism, therefore, is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed “anticipatory optimism” — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail. I am hesitant to say “win” because, as I’ve written elsewhere, assessing movements only in terms of wins and losses obscures the power of movements to inform and transform us. Here is the power of poiesis, of making new worlds and new relationships — not from nothing but from love — rather than reforming or bandaging old systems. So we come full circle. It is not enough to be anti-capitalist and/or anti-prisons and police, to beat back a half-millennium of catastrophe. We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore once told an interviewer, “Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something…. Abolition is a theory of change, it’s a theory of social life. It’s about making things.”
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
George Yancy
George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair of U.S. History at UCLA and a contributing editor at Boston Review. His many books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times Of An American Original, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, and Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012). Kelley’s essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including The Nation, Monthly Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, New York Times (Arts and Leisure), New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Color Lines, Code Magazine, Utne Reader, Lenox Avenue, African Studies Review, Black Music Research Journal,Callaloo, New Politics, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, One World, Social Text, Metropolis,American Visions, Boston Review, Fashion Theory, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, Souls, and frieze: contemporary art and culture, to name a few.
Although trained as an American historian, Kelley's research and teaching interests range widely, covering the history of labor and radical movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; intellectual and cultural history (particularly music and visual culture); urban studies, and transnational movements. He is also a contributor to Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence
The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition Recognized Fascism Didn’t Begin in Europe
Black anti-fascists have long warned about creeping fascism, from slavery to mass incarceration to ICE terror.
- Prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility give the Black Power salute on September 10, 1971. “I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and prison abolitionists,” says scholar Jeanelle K. Hope. “The Attica prison uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.”Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images
Back in 2016, I was asked what I thought about Donald Trump. Even back then, I saw him as an aspiring fascist, and I responded:
Simply put. He is a conduit through which white America expresses its most vile desire for white purity. An apocalyptically dangerous white man who sees himself as the center of the world. That kind of hubris bespeaks realities of genocide.
Trump 2.0 has only confirmed my fears, my dread, and my anger. Make no mistake about it: This administration is unapologetically and shamelessly hellbent on establishing a violent white fascistic state. I know that some are surprised, but the truth of the matter is that the horrible reality of anti-Black fascism is not a new formation. The soul of this country was founded upon white power, white greed, and white violence. So, I am not surprised by the likes of Trump; he is a product of a vicious poison, a historical legacy, that predates his abominable presidency. But this isn’t mere speculation or exaggeration. Our bodies and psyches are a record of this history: chains, enslavement, dehumanization, scarred backs, raped bodies, castrated bodies, broken necks, broken family ties, denied rights, denied citizenship, mass incarceration, and slow death. Indeed, there are those Black voices who not only recorded this history, but who understood its fascistic logics. For example, Black poet and activist Langston Hughes wrote:
"Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us."
And it was Black sociologist and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois who wrote, “We have conquered Germany … but not their ideas. We still believe in white supremacy, keeping Negroes in their place.”
Thinking about the reality of anti-Black fascism led me to the indispensable work of Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. When it comes to documenting anti-Black fascism, they trace a longer arc with respect to the rise of fascism; they show just how European fascists drew from early U.S. laws for their own specific fascist formations, and how the U.S. functioned as the very hub of fascist discourse and practice. Given this rich history and its importance for how to strategize moving forward, I conducted this exclusive interview with Jeanelle K. Hope, who is an independent scholar and a lecturer at the University of California-Washington Center.
George Yancy: It is important to historically situate the phenomenon of fascism, especially within our contemporary context where the Constitution is being trampled upon, and what one might call the paramilitary deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Your book, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, which you co-authored with Bill V. Mullen, powerfully challenges the narrative that fascism is a phenomenon that is exclusive to 20th-century Europe. In this regard, your book constitutes a necessary counter-narrative that highlights the gratuitous violent history that Black people in the U.S. have faced since their enslavement. This counter-narrative is what you term the Black anti-fascist tradition. In brief, what are some of the features that define the Black anti-fascist tradition?
Jeanelle K. Hope: The Black anti-fascist tradition recognizes that there has been a long arc of fascism throughout history, and that anti-Blackness has long undergirded fascist policies and formations, thus, disrupting prevailing historical narratives and theorizing on fascism. We argue that the earliest roots (or pillars) of fascism — authoritarian rule, genocide and ethnic cleansing, militarism, racial capitalism, dual application of the law — can be traced to the colonization of Africa and chattel slavery across the Americas. One of the most salient and defining features of anti-Black fascism is genocide. We chart out the systematic genocide of Black people from the brutality of enslavement, post-emancipation lynchings, to state-sanctioned violence and police brutality. Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors and Red Record, W.E.B. Du Bois’s lynching reports in The Crisis, William Patterson’s petition to the United Nations entitled, “We Charge Genocide,” and Arlene Eisen’s 2012 report “Operation Ghetto Storm” all meticulously document the impact of lynchings and the immiseration of Black life. And with such damming evidence in hand, they argued that such acts constitute genocide. Indeed, “We Charge Genocide” emerges as a cross-generation rallying cry among Black anti-fascists like Patterson, Stokely Carmichael, and the Chicago-based youth group aptly named “We Charge Genocide.”
Beyond presenting this counter-narrative, so much of our book also names how Black people have been on the front lines of anti-fascist struggles in Europe (the Spanish Civil War), Ethiopia (the Italian invasion of Ethiopia), and across the United States. Moreover, the Black anti-fascist tradition underscores that fascism attacks on multiple fronts (i.e., art and cultural production, education, immigration, law and policy, health care, housing, etc.) and subsequently, requires a multifaceted resistance. Black anti-fascists have incorporated various organizing strategies, tactics, and actions including legal challenges, mutual aid, anarchy, autonomy, self-defense, boycotts, solidarity, and abolition.
What I think is an important takeaway from the Black anti-fascist tradition is knowing that Black people have long warned about what I describe as fascism’s incessant creep. Fascism is not born overnight. It is relentless and creeps through society, systems, laws, and more over time. Black anti-fascists have played the long game, trying to check the creep of fascism at every turn, knowing that if left unchecked, humanity will enter some truly dark days.
In your book, you write, “By the time the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini began to theorize racial purity and Aryan identity politics, discussing race in this quasi-biological sense in the U.S. was old news.” This is such an important observation as it places anti-Black racism at the very core of the foundation of this nation. Talk about the centrality of “racial purity” and how that myth shaped the U.S., and how it continues to do so. And here I’m thinking about Trump’s disgusting use of the expression “shithole countries” and his encouragement of immigrants from Norway.
Recognizing that race/racism/racial hierarchy are at the very foundation of colonial rule, it is of no surprise that race is also at the crux of fascism. From the onset, the history of the United States is marked by colonialism, and race almost immediately emerges as a system of domination to subordinate Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans brought to the country. This racial hierarchy had/has significant economic and social implications. With Black, Brown, and Indigenous people viewed as subordinate, the belief of white supremacy and white domination in the western hemisphere was fomented. Up until the early 20th century (and some would even argue still today), great lengths (i.e. anti-miscegenation laws, racial integrity laws, racial purity tests, etc.) were undertaken to ensure a rigid racial hierarchy. The mere existence of interracial relationships and mixed-race people has long served as a threat to this system, blurring the racial binary, and forcing society and governments to have deeper questions about “who is white,” and thus, gets to benefit from this system of domination.
Moreover, throughout U.S. history, this “gatekeeping” or protectionism of the white race shows up countless times from anti-immigration laws (i.e., the Chinese Exclusion Act), Jim Crow laws, the eugenics movement, and recent discourse around the “Great Replacement” theory. These efforts have largely (and unsuccessfully) sought to stymie influxes of non-white immigration, non-white births, and interracial relationships. It is also important to name that the constant pursuit of white racial purity is fundamentally tied to patriarchy, natalism and the regulation of women’s bodies, hence the recent rollbacks on abortion access and reproductive health care.
I was aware of Adolf Hitler’s admiration for the U.S.’s racial segregationist practices and its eugenics movement, but your argument delineates in detail that European fascism “had its roots in American Anti-Black Fascism.” This is a significant charge against the U.S.’s view of itself as “innocent,” and as a “shining city on a hill.” Indeed, it is this understanding of the U.S. that is necessary as we currently confront fascism in this country. You write, “Seldom have historians drawn connections between the Nuremberg Laws, Italian Racial Laws, and Jim Crow Laws of the US.” What is it about certain historians that they have failed or refused to make such a significant connection? I would even say such a significant indictment.
Naming that U.S. racial policies effectively served a blueprint for the various legal systems of European fascism would disrupt a decades-long historical narrative surrounding WWI and WWII. The story of the “Axis vs. the Allies,” and the United States’ role in defeating fascism has long been the prevailing historical narrative taken up by historians. I think there is at times a failure among historians to step back, read across archives, and to stitch multiple historical events together. We also must be honest that there has been a concerted effort among both politicians and historians to preserve a liberal or redeeming narrative surrounding the United States’ role in WWII. For example, it took decades for mainstream American history to finally recognize that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war was heinous. Yet some would still draw the line at comparing those “internment camps” to Nazi concentration camps. But it is that type of comparison that is direly needed to be able to understand the impact and evolution of fascism across time and space. We must also connect the current ICE detention centers to this broader history as well.
Finally, I think one of the biggest issues among historians, and even many leftist activists, is the aversion to name any formation of fascism outside of interwar Europe as fascism. For far too long, many have believed that Hitler and Mussolini’s fascist rise was like capturing lightning in a bottle, when fascism has long existed beyond the confines of early 20th-century European history. From a deeply human standpoint I understand why one would want to believe that the atrocities of the Holocaust and Nazism could not be replicated. Yet, Black anti-fascists have long rang the proverbial alarm about the incessant creeping nature of fascism and its onslaught on Black life. Furthermore, to ignore or discount the claims of Black people like Robert F. Williams, Harry Haywood, George Jackson — among a host of others that have named fascism as the greatest threat to Black people (and all people) just because they don’t neatly fit within longstanding scholarly traditions on historical fascism — to me, is ahistorical.
I agree! Talk about how contemporary forms of abolitionist discourse and activism are linked to the Black anti-fascist tradition. I think that such a link is so important as it communicates the historical arc of Black people who continue to refuse fascism.
I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and prison abolitionists starting with George Jackson, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Kathleen Cleaver, and later in the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Dylan Rodriguez, among others. Many of the Black political prisoners of the late 1960s and early 1970s were among the most vocal in naming that America was engaging in fascism, arguing that prisons and the rise of mass incarceration amounted to the latest evolution of fascism’s incessant creep on society. They recognized that prisons helped facilitate systematic genocide and was buttressed by a criminal justice and legal system that openly practiced a dual application of the law, whereby Black people were subjected to different interpretations of the law and harsher sentences, among other injustices. I think about Ericka Huggins’s letters from Niantic prison where she describes their poor conditions, the inhumane nature of solitary confinement, and the unjust way many Black Panther Party members, and other radicals of the era, were largely swept into prisons on trumped-up charges. I even think of those early pages of Assata Shakur’s autobiography (Assata: An Autobiography) where she describes the guards of the prison in which she was incarcerated giving Nazi salutes to each other. The Attica prison uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.
Prison abolitionists have long connected American prisons to the long arc of fascism, arguing that they are so deeply entrenched in fascism that they are beyond reform, concluding that abolition is the only solution. These arguments, of course, are most fervently explored in Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? and the work of Critical Resistance. It is from Davis and Critical Resistance’s work that more contemporary abolitionists descend. Thus, it is of no surprise that during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, calls to abolish the police emerged, and with the current wave of mass deportations and practice of “crimmigration,” there are calls to abolish ICE. The Black anti-fascist tradition recognizes that the incarceration of Black people has long been tied to the fascist pillar of genocide, thus, any reproduction of incarceration — be it ICE detention centers or Japanese internment camps — will always be part of a broader fascist project. The harrowing reports of ICE detention center conditions and deaths is the latest harbinger of fascism’s incessant creep.
Given the specificity of how Black people in the U.S. have been brutalized and dehumanized in terms of anti-Black fascist logics, talk about what strategies have emerged out of Black struggles for countering and resisting (I want to say overthrowing) U.S. fascism. On this topic, I often feel a great deal of pessimism. Yet I agree with Robin D. G. Kelly where he said to me, “There is no guarantee that we will win — whatever that means — but I guarantee that if we don’t fight, we lose.”
To feel pessimistic under the boot of fascism is only natural, and a feeling that is important to sit with. To draw upon the words of Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, I think we also must work through that pessimism and “let this [moment] radicalize you.” Earlier in the interview, I highlighted some of the major organizing tactics, strategies, and actions that animate the Black anti-fascist tradition, so I’ll use this space to stress some more practical forms of resistance for this moment. First and foremost, we all must begin the resistance to fascism through organizing and studying.
Remember, fascism attacks on all fronts, so we must develop a strategy that recognizes this and can be adapted in various spaces. Fascist policies are dismantling public education before our eyes. Parents and teachers must organize at the school district level to resist book bans and anti-ethnic studies bills. And even more so, parents must see “school choice” and “school vouchers” for what they are — the privatization of public schools. This is anti-democratic.
Fascism will quite literally starve its constituents. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of mutual aid in a moment where unemployment is increasing, particularly amongst Black women, and the federal government has slashed the budgets of many social safety-net programs, like SNAP. As fascism seeks to further divide society, we must remember to take care of those in our communities.
While there have been several boycotts and protests over the last 13 months, I do think there is much we can learn from European citizens that have mounted national strikes in response to government austerity. Overall, there is much that can be done to organize workers, as fascism’s grip on capitalism will have disproportionate impacts on the worker — as we are currently witnessing.
And most importantly, one of the most significant efforts we can do to resist fascism is to build solidarity. Solidarity is crucial to resisting fascism as it spurs organizations and mass movements. Solidarity is built through relationships, shared struggle, and deep communication with one another. While this work may seem ancillary, it will prove to be our most challenging, as fascism (and predatory social media algorithms) has fractured so many communities. Fascism thrives on division (racial, economic, national, political, gender, age, etc.), so one of the most important ways to resist it is to close those divides through respect and mutual cooperation.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
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.
