Racial Fascism

On Toni Morrison’s reflections on fascism, see Roderick Ferguson’s illuminating essay “We Cannot Be the Same After the Siege,” Allies, ed. Ed Pavlić et al. (Boston Review, 2019). See also Ferguson’s powerful call for an anti-fascist politicization grounded in queer-of-color critique in “Authoritarianism and the Planetary Mission of Queer of Color Critique,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 21, no. 3 (2020).

Mike Baker and Evan Hill, “Police Say an Antifa Activist Likely Shot at Officers. His Gun Suggests Otherwise,” New York Times, April 10, 2021.

The recent New York Review of Books debate featuring Peter E. Gordon, Sam Moyn, and Sarah Churchwell provides an informative panorama of positions on this question. Peter E. Gordon, “Why Historical Analogy Matters,” New York Review of Books, January 7, 2020; Samuel Moyn, “The Trouble with Comparisons,” New York Review of Books, May 19, 2020; Sarah Churchwell, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 2020.

Cedric J. Robinson, “Fascism and the Response of Black Radical Theorists,” in Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H. L. T. Quan (Pluto, 2019), 149.

Quoted in Bill Schwartz, “George Padmore,” in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwartz (Manchester University Press, 2003), 141–2. Though unlike Padmore he maintained his fealty to Soviet Communism, R. Palme Dutt also discerned the continuities between European fascism and Empire: “In the poems of a Kipling, in the Boer War agitation of a Daily Mail, in the war dictatorship of a Lloyd George riding roughshod over constitutional forms and driving to the aim of a ‘Knock-out Blow,’ the spirit of Fascism is already present in embryonic forms.” R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (Lawrence & Wishart, 1935), 240. See also Alfie Hancox, “Fascisation as an Expression of Imperialist Decay: Rajani Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution,” Liberated Texts, March 23, 2021.

“Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom. What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957; Earthscan, 2003), 106–7; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972; Verso, 2018), 243.

Langston Hughes, “Too Much of Race,” Crisis 44, no. 9 (September 1937), 272. See also the poem “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943,” whose final lines are: “How long I got to fight / BOTH HITLER—AND JIM CROW.”

I borrow the term “racial fascism” from Baraka, who crucially posits a violent dialectic between the dynamics of racial domination in the United States and imperialism, a theme that Du Bois himself had powerfully underscored as early as “The African Roots of War” (1915): “Andrew Johnson’s point position in overthrowing Reconstruction and imposing a racial fascism on Afro America and the Afro American people readied the whole of the U.S. nation for imperialist rule, which today has moved to complete control of the entire nation.” Amiri Baraka, “Black Reconstruction: Du Bois & the U.S. Struggle for Democracy & Socialism,” Conjunctions, no. 29 (1997): 78.

Harry Harootunian, “A Fascism for Our Time,” Massachusetts Review, 2021. Harootunian details the “founding oligarchical intentions” and constitutional constructions that, in conjunction with the material histories of racial capitalism, have seeded sui generis fascist potentials into the US body politic and its ruling institutions.

Jean Genet, “May Day Speech,” in The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, trans. Jeff Fort, ed. Albert Dichy (Stanford University Press, 2004), 38.

On anti-imperialist anti-fascism as coalitional politics among people of color in the United States, see also the fascinating essay by Michael Staudenmaier, “‘America’s Scapegoats’: Ideas of Fascism in the Construction of the US Latina/o/x Left, 1973–83,” in “Fascism and Anti-Fascism Since 1945,” special issue, Radical History Review, no. 138 (October 2020).

See for instance the dossier on “new fascism, new democracy” organized by Maoist militants around the newspaper La Cause du peuple in Les Temps modernes, no. 310 (1972), especially André Glucksmann’s article “Fascisme: L’ancien et le nouveau.” For the French Trotskyist debate, see Jean-Marie Brohm et al., Le gaullisme, et après? État fort et fascisation (François Maspero, 1974). The best critical appraisal of theories of fascism in the US revolutionary left in the 1970s is Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev), “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions,” Urgent Tasks, no. 4 (1978).

George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972; Penguin, 1975), 121–22. For a contemporary theoretical discussion of Jackson’s theses, see ARM (Association for the Realization of Marxism), “George Jackson, Monopoly Capitalism and the Fascist Type of State,” The Black Liberator 2, no. 3 (1974–75).

Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism (Basic Books, 1974), 256.

Jacques Derrida, “Letter to Jean Genet (fragments),” Negotiations, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford University Press, 2002), 43. See also Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, “Yes Of Course … Derrida to Genet on Commitment in Favor of Jackson,” New Formations, no. 75 (2012); Tyler M. Williams, “Derrida and the Censorship of Literature,” New Centennial Review 20, no. 1 (2020).

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2001), 36. Where Pinkham translates “boomerang,” the original French speaks of a “choc en retour,” a “recoil,” “return shock,” or “backlash.”

Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials, editorial introduction to Penny Nakatsu, “Speech at the United Front against Fascism Conference (1969),” in The US Antifascism Reader, ed. Mullen and Vials (Verso, 2020), 271. See also the discussion of the “spatial metaphor” of fascism in Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 124, 125.

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 125.

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 126.

Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 2, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Verso, 2012).

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 148.

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 158. See also Kathleen Cleaver, “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder,” The Black Panther, September 14, 1968, 8.

Herbert Marcuse, “USA: Questions of Organization and the Revolutionary Subject,” The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 3, ed. Douglas Kellner (Routledge, 2005), 138. The notion of preventive counterrevolution had been used to define fascism in the Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri’s La contro-rivoluzione preventiva: Riflessioni sul fascismo (L. Cappelli, 1922). See also R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (Wildside Press, 2020), 123.

Étienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001): 16.

Marcuse, “USA,” 137–38. The question of fascism’s new modalities is a leitmotif in the writings of Marcuse’s last decade. Sometimes he stresses, as in this passage, the objective possibility of a new fascism; at others, he soberly notes the limited if real freedoms that residually obtain in liberal capitalist democracies. See also Herbert Marcuse, “Le Monde Diplomatique” (1976), in Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 6, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (Routledge, 2014), 360.

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 162.

Angela Y. Davis and Bettina Aptheker, “Preface,” in If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, ed. Angela Y. Davis (1971; Verso, 2016), xiv. See also Angela Y. Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation,” in If They Come in the Morning, 37.

Half a century on, Davis insists on the relevance of the category of fascism, and its character as a reaction to Black liberation struggles. See “Interview with Angela Y. Davis,” in Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah (Verso, 2020), 209–10. Davis’s principal reference in her discussion of fascism remains Marcuse, especially his 1934 essay “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State.”

Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation,” 41.

Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation,” 44.

Davis and Aptheker, “Preface,” xv; Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation,” 41.

Angela Y. Davis, “Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 63. Cited in Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minneapolis Press, 2006), 141.

Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 117.

Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 130.

Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 137. For a provocative exploration of the superimposition of fascism and liberal legality under late-capitalist crisis conditions, see Antonio Negri, “Fascismo e diritto: un esperimento di metodo,” in Macchina tempo: Rompicapi Liberazione Costituzione (Feltrinelli, 1982). See also “Interview with Toni Negri (1980),” in Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967–1983) (Red Notes, 1988), 122.

Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 140–41.

Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006): 79.

Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 138). Saraiva’s book is an immensely original and methodologically rich study of fascism in its settler-colonial dimensions, drawing critically on studies of science and technology.

Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017), 26.

Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 172–73. The juridical devices for the dispossession and racialization of Indigenous people in the United States in turn played a formative role in Nazi legal thought, which extended Hitlerism’s self-identification as a white settler-colonial project (the Generalplan Ost as replica of Manifest Destiny) into racial laws forged after the US example. See James Q. Whitman’s enlightening Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2018).