By George Yancy
This article was originally published by Truthout
Black anti-fascists have long warned about creeping fascism, from slavery to mass incarceration to ICE terror.
Back in 2016, I was questioned what I considered 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 unapoloreceiveically 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 counattempt 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 notified 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 reveal 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 relocating forward, I conducted this exclusive interview with Jeanelle K. Hope, who is an indepfinishent 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, houtilizing, 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 consider 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, attempting 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 launched 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 considering about Trump’s disgusting utilize 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 counattempt. 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, receives to benefit from this system of domination.
Moreover, throughout U.S. history, this “gatekeeping” or protectionism of the white race reveals up countless times from anti-immigration laws (i.e., the Chinese Exclusion Act), Jim Crow laws, the eugenics shiftment, 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 shiftment, 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 counattempt. 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 refutilized to create such a significant connection? I would even state 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 consider there is at times a failure among historians to step back, read across archives, and to stitch multiple historical events toreceiveher. 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 necessaryed 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 consider one of the hugegest 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 becautilize 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 consider that such a link is so important as it communicates the historical arc of Black people who continue to refutilize 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 assisted 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 consider 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 consider 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 descfinish. Thus, it is of no surprise that during the height of the Black Lives Matter shiftment, 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 state 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 declared 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 consider 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 utilize this space to stress some more practical forms of resistance for this moment. First and foremost, we all must launch 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 budreceives 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 consider 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 shiftments. 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, gfinisher, age, etc.), so one of the most important ways to resist it is to close those divides through respect and mutual cooperation.
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