Rev Left Radio - Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

This episode is from our sister podcast Guerrilla History, subscribe to it on your preferred podcast app!   In this absolutely fabulous episode of Guerrilla History, we bring back on the one and only Dr. CBS, Charisse Burden-Stelly!  Here, we discuss her outstanding new book Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States.  This work focuses on how anti-radical repression (especially anti-communist repression) is infused and inseparable with anti-Black racial oppression, and vice versa.  This is a critical work by one of the most critical voices in our times, and we think that this conversation is a truly important one for everyone to hear!   Charisse Burden-Stelly is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the coauthor (alongside Gerald Horne) of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History and the coeditor (alongside Jodi Dean) of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing.  Join the Black Alliance for Peace or BAP Solidarity Network, keep up with Dr. CBS's work by checking out her website www.charisseburdenstelly.com, and follow her on twitter @blackleftaf.   Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckmanke, joined as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you, Henry. Yeah, it's nice to see you too. Also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Men, podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you? I'm doing very well. Great. Nice to see you as always. And we have an awesome guest today, but before I introduce the guest, I would just like to

remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like the one that you're listening to right now by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history with gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that the show is putting out, as well as what the three of us are doing individually by going to Twitter and following us at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. Like I said, we have a returning guest, actually, one of our favorite people, one of our favorite scholars. We have Dr. Charisse Burdenstelli talking about her new, excellent book, one that I've been looking forward to for years at this point. I know I've been

bugging you, professor, for a couple of years. When is Black Scare, Red Scare going to be available? And it finally is. So it's nice to have you back on the show, Doc. Thanks so much for having me and for your enthusiasm for the work. I hope it's lived up to the hype. It certainly did. So I know that I've known you for about three and a half years now. You were actually one of the first people that I've interviewed, not even for, it was before guerrilla history even existed. And I had known about Black Scare, Red Scare, being in the works for at least two years, maybe two and a half. And like I said, I've been really looking forward to it this whole time. And it certainly did not disappoint. I am incredibly happy that, you know, you have this work

come out. I think that it's a tremendous intervention on a critical subject. And it was everything that I was hoping for. So I appreciate that. I appreciate you undertaking this, this really monumental task. So thank you for that. I want to get into the conversation today, kind of in the opposite direction that we would normally, which is kind of following the book from beginning to end. I'm actually going to jump in at the end of the book to kind of lay out what we're talking about. So again, the book is Black Scare, Red Scare, Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States.

So in the epilogue of the book, one of the things that you, you mention is the investigation into the African People's Socialist Party, and the investigation was looking whether there was ties to Russia into the party. Now, this is a great example that shows that the Black Scare, Red Scare, phenomena that you go over over the course of this book is still alive and kicking today. Of course, this is not the only example that we have, and you've provided many throughout this book, both historically as well as in contemporary day and how this propagates itself within society.

But I think that this example is a really good encapsulation in just one specific case of this phenomenon that you're talking about. So in throwing out this example to you of the African People's Socialist Party, can you then describe what is this phenomenon of the Black Scare, Red Scare, that we're then going to talk about on a more theoretical basis and historical basis. and historical basis throughout the conversation that we're going to have with you today. Yeah. So in April of 2023, the African People's Socialist Party was indicted by the U.S. government. There are three people. There's the chairman, O'Mali, Yashatela, and then actually

two members of the Solidarity Network. So two white members of the Solidarity Organization. And essentially, they were actually indicted under the Foreign Agency. Registration Act, which is the same act that W.B. Du Bois was indicted under in 1951 for being an agent of a foreign power, the Soviet Union at that time, for his peace work. And so what's interesting about the case of the APSP is that they are a relatively small, some argued relatively obscure organization that's been around for quite some times. It's the 1970s. And effectively, they were accused of being sort of an agent of Russia and sewing dissent within the United States. And one of the pieces of evidence was that they charged the United States with genocide, right?

Which is interesting because in 1951, the very much sort of American organization, the Civil Rights Congress, charged United States with genocide in a very, you know, a very popular petition called We Charge Genocide. and they also were disciplined out of existence in that moment. So the editor of Recharge Genocide, for example, William Patterson had his passport revoked. The petition was buried in the U.N., people like Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out against it. And even Lemke, I always forget his first name, but he is the sort of architect of, or one of the architects of like the genocide convention, sort of push back against the petition and argued that African-American. were not subject to genocide. So all of that to say is very interesting that the United States attributed this charge of genocide to Russian machinations when there's a U.S.-based history for this charge. And so they're currently sort of waiting for the trial to start. But essentially,

of all of the organizations that could have been indicted, it's a black socialist organization. And so this still goes to show how there's always a suspicion about black people generally, but black radicals, particularly, that they're susceptible to foreign influence, that they're sort of constitutively subversive, that their citizenship and loyalty is questionable at best, and that they simply can't be trusted. It doesn't matter how big or small the organization is. And so this is how the sort of black scare, red scare comes together, right? It's this idea that on the one hand, people who are advocating for economic democracy, for lack of a better term, some type of structural transformation and political economy that they're not only sort of dangerous to a threat to U.S. national security, but then latent in that threat is a challenge to the racial order, right?

Because surely if there's economic redistribution, then the undeserving blacks amongst other groups will also will benefit to the detriment of white folks. the black scare likewise is this idea that black social equality is not only unwarranted and dangerous but that it also threatens the primacy of white people right that it risks devalurization and devaluation of whiteness and then latent in that is this idea that this did less in a sort of anti-American or a radical doctrine because of course true americans patriots people who who believe in the project of the United States would never see themselves as on par with black people or would never sort of put black people in a position to certainly to rule over or to have any sort of power over or even on par with white folks. And so the sort of Harbinger or the the culprit of advocating this type of social equality has historically been like the radical after 1917. It was primarily. the Bolshevik. And so we see all of these things at play with the case of the APSP,

this, again, this idea of foreign inspiration, of outside agitation, of black radicals being the sort of quintessential threat to the United States, because there's any number of other organizations that could have been charged, but it's the APSP. So that's the sort of way to use the SPSP as an entry point into the story that I tell it in the book. Yeah, wonderful. And incredibly important. I'm going to do the opposite of what Henry did. I'm jumping all the way back to the very beginning of your wonderful book. And I just want to say, first of all, it's always an honor to speak with you. And I really loved this book. Highly encourage anybody out there listening to go and get it to support you and your work and to, of course, learn

from this text. And the introduction to your text, though, and I wanted to say this because, of course, we've had you on Rev. Left recently to talk about Du Bois. And you start the introduction to this book with a sort of, you know, presentation of Du Bois and his criticism in a lot of ways that are parallel to your criticism that you sort of pick up and run with in this text. And you talk about certain which words that Du Bois talks about. So I'm wondering if you can discuss Du Bois, his which words, the influence that he has on this text, and maybe other figures that inspired you in writing this book. Yeah. So, you know, Du Bois says effectively, like, we invent which words to essentially undermine and discredit like laudable or worthwhile forms of organization. So he starts

by saying, during the time of transatlantic enslavement, the which word was abolitionist. This was somebody who wanted to fundamentally disrupt the social order. You know, the abolitionist was a nigger lover, a scoundrel, you know, a traitor to the race, right? And then he says that that the word today, and he's talking in 1949, he said the word, today is communist. If somebody advocates for, you know, economic equality, for racial equality, for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, they are considered to be a subversive, a traitor, and are liable to be sort of thrown in jail, blacklisted, or subjected to some other form of state repression. And so that's an important quote because, again, he's really

drawing a parallel between the threats of black liberation on the one hand and the threats of communism on the other hand. And the invention of which words is important to the text because in the last section I talk about what I call legitimating architecture or the way that the repression of radicals, the anti-black oppression that sort of is constitutive of the United States, how they are legitimated and narrated. Because you have the material practice and you have all the ways that it becomes normalized and it becomes rationalized to the point where any challenge to it becomes a challenge to common sense, right? It becomes a challenge to the appropriate social order. And so, Du Bois is important to the text. I talk about him

elsewhere in terms of his indictment in 1951 for his peace activism and because of the ways that militarism and war mongering and war are essential to the U.S. methodology of accumulation, And any organizing for peace that challenges imperialism and that encourages peaceful coexistence was, again, considered to be like some foreign imagination, a Soviet plot, something that's antithetical to the United States. And, you know, so Du Bois is important in that regard. He's also important because when he's talking about peace, he's not simply talking about some kumbaya absence of conflict.

He's talking about the eradication of imperialism. and colonialism and war mongering and how anti-black racial oppression and red baiting specifically through the use of anti-communism really undermines that project. It only serves to emiserate like the global masses. Other figures that are important in the work are William Patterson, who I talked about, who was the editor of We Charged Genocide. There's Althea's Hunton, who was a member of the Council on African Affairs, as well as the Civil Rights Congress.

he ended up going into exile and dying in Zambia. He worked for a short time with Deputy B. Du Bois on the Encyclopedia Afrikanah in Ghana. There's Louise Thompson Patterson, who's the wife of William Patterson and a theorist in her own right. Esther Cooper Jackson. So there's a lot of, there's Dorothy Hunton, who's like the wife of Althea's Hunting. So there's a lot of sort of people in and around the Communist Party whose work I lift up because historically it's been subjected to what I call intellectual McCarthyism. We don't know about these people because their work is not, they're not considered

knowledge producers. They're considered to be stuages, Moscow, to be dogmatist, to be subjected to a party line. And so we don't take their analysis seriously. But indeed, and in fact, much of what they were saying in the 1940s and 1950s is still relevant today, especially their critiques of imperialism and capitalism and neol colonialism. And then some of the, you know, every generation tries to reinvent the wheel and we simply don't have to do that, right? So I really try to draw on the work of these black radicals to bring them back into the fold of political theory and of political analysis, but also to challenge this idea that

because of, because their political minorities, as well as racial minorities, that their ideas don't count. Just a quick note before Adnan Hobson with his question. So you, You mentioned a lot of names, and I want to help advertise a book that you have the forward on. So you mentioned Alfeus Huntan. There is a book, which I proudly have a copy of, thanks to you, got it a couple of years ago from you. Alfeus Huntin, the unsung valiant, written by Dorothy Hunton, who you mentioned also in that previous answer. So listeners, if you're interested in the Huntins, written by Dorothy, about Alfeas, and with a terrific forward by Dr. CBS, you can pick that book up at international publishers. And I highly recommend that and I do

really appreciate you sending me that copy. It was a great read during that time of the pandemic when we were all going a bit stir crazy at the time. Adnan. Oh yeah. There's so much to talk about here in this wonderful, really rich piece of scholarship. So maybe I'll just, since my colleagues here have gone to the front and the back of the book and just jump into a section in the middle that I was intrigued with, really. And it relates a little bit to this point that you were making about the use of the red scare, particularly targeting black radical activists. There seems to be, in some ways, a kind of tension that there is this discursive kind

of logic operating that undermines kind of legitimacy of black political activism by making them completely foreign or subject to foreign, you know, influence and so on. And yet also at the same time, there is a kind of black internationalism that is emerging and developing during this period. Somebody like W.B. Du Bois who were talking about as somebody who really thinks about kind of the anti-colonial struggle on a worldwide and global level where he really responds to and affiliates with the, you know, darker nations of the world coming into freedom, which is, of course, going to be very radical and destabilizing of this kind of period where the United States is starting to come out of, you know, just its sort of small hemispheric kind of dominance

into being a kind of global power first through the beginning of this period where you mention of involvement in, you know, World War I that starts to propel the U.S. to be kind of taking over almost for the British and that will come to, you know, real fruition in the post-war period, which is exactly when it seems that, you know, that Du Bois quote that you begin, you know, in 1949 with his testimony. So I'm wondering, how do you think about that kind of tension, that in some ways, you know, there is a rooted Americanness that's being kind of undermined. I mean, this is the population that built the United States and was inhabited this crucial part in the development of the nation, without which it wouldn't be the nation that it came to be, without, you know, black labor being exploited and subordinated in this racial hierarchy for, you know, this kind of form of. capitalism and on the other hand this kind of natural kind of internationalism of colonial of

analyzing this you know blacks as a nation within a nation with the black nationalist orientation and black internationalism that saw affiliation with freedom struggles around the world as being connected you know it just reminds me of you know Malcolm X saying I'm not even an American you know like I don't even get to be a citizen and I don't even claim to be an American. Meanwhile, while he's also being, you know, subject to surveillance and subversion and, you know, connected with foreign influence and so on. So I'm wondering how you kind of think about that kind of problem in this, where it's not just a question of discourse that's used to undermine them, but it's also actual genuine political affiliations in the kind

of consciousness of anti-colonial struggle. Well, what's interesting about that, question is like, okay, well, the capitalists are internationalists. That doesn't undermine their Americanism. That doesn't undermine their patriotism. It doesn't undermine their commitment to the United States. But somehow when black folks or oppressed folks engaged in internationalism, it's a fundamental challenge to like the pedagogy or the docs of the state. And so, you know, the answer that, you know, if you read the work of Gerald Horn, for example, he will, his of work conveys that black people have always been internationalists, whether they've linked up with the British against the United States or linked up with the Japanese or fought alongside, you know,

Mexicans during the, you know, the Spanish-American War, et cetera, et cetera. And so this is the conundrum, right? In some ways, the black people have to be subversive in order to be free. But the way that subversion is constituted is antithetical to the very constitution of the United States because black people, any, all people are supposed to have a freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association. And yet, and so it's a, it's really a day for you. It's an irresolvable contradiction in order to really be free and equal and to live up to the ideals that the United States sets out, black people, oppressed people have to engage in these forms of organizing and linkage and connection beyond U.S. borders

in order to put pressure on the state. But again, it is only when certain people engage in these practices that it becomes problematic, right? And it's only when black people have the same ideas as a foreign group or link up with a foreign group that it becomes a threat to national security in ways that don't apply, again, to the fact that, All of the capitalists are internationalists. They are, you know, they've got great ties with Mussolini, for example, with Hitler, with real enemies purportedly of the U.S. state. And they're not subjected to the same scrutiny. And so that's where the discursive or the narration, the legitimating architecture comes into play because it's simply how these things, these practices are codified. And so certainly black people have historically had to engage in internationalism. And that has been that along with a sort of,

a particular correlation of forces is when black people have been most successful. Black people have also engaged in a form of like liberal anti-communism, Cold War liberalism that I write about in the text, whereby they have tried to assert black patriotism and an anti-communism in order to really diure the black scare and the red scare. So they use the red scare in order to try to undermine the black scare. But part of what I try to argue out is, you really can't pull them apart and that there are some nominal gains that are made, but ultimately the weight of the drag net of anti-communism works is that you can be a liberal, you could be a social Democrat, you can be an anarchist, you can have a range of political

ideologies, but if there's anything that resonates with communism in its broad construction, then you two are guilty by association at the very least. And so it just doesn't work out. And so I think that, you know, you know, black peoples, and there are, there have been sort of radical forms of internationalism that have been sort of anti-colonial and anti-imperial. There's also been the sort of liberal anti-communist internationalism whereby it was argued out that the reason the United States needs to support anti-colonial struggle is precisely to ward off the communists, that if the U.S. is going to gain the hearts in minds of the decolonizing world and to open up markets there. and spread U.S. culture, then number one, they had to roll back Jim Crow at home. And number two, they had to support these anti-colonial struggles in a way that was compatible with liberal democracy.

And so there's a lot of contradictions. There's a lot of, you know, tension in how black people are understood in the types of organizing in which they're engaging, but they're not afforded that complexity, right? they're not afforded political agency. It's, it's generally speaking, the discourse is of outside agitation, of foreign inspiration, of dangerous unrest, and which which construes black people as a population that always need to be managed, that always need to be controlled, and against whom extraordinary violence is legitimate because ultimately they're, you know, threatening to the state.

I'm going to follow up here and first I'm actually going to read a small section of this just to kind of underscore what you were saying and also to demonstrate for the listeners that this is a very readable work and I really love your writing style professor. You're a lovely read as well in terms of how you write as well as what you write. So this is from chapter two of the book. You say the black scare and the red scare were produced discursively as interaction metaphors that undergirded the entire logic of Americanism and un-Americanism in U.S. capitalist racist society. Interaction metaphors interact to proffer a network of meanings that result from the interaction of the two terms

and cannot be reduced to literal comparison. The black scare and the red scare interact to produce a variety of linked discourses including subversion, sedition, insurrection, un-Americanness, threat to internal slash national security foreign-inspired, deception, disloyalty, sowing division and confusion and infiltration. The interaction between the two parts of the metaphor rendered legible the threat of black through economic radicalism and the threat of red through racial agitation, given that both threatened racial hierarchy rooted in economic exploitation

and capitalist accumulation ordered along the color line. I think very hard-hitting and straightforward analysis there, but written in a really nice way. So, you know, listeners, this is also a good read from, you know, like a literary perspective as well. So do pick it up if, you know, that is up your alley. But what I wanted to hit on is one of the terms that is mentioned in this section is U.S. capitalist racist society.

And this question is going to be a little bit definitional in terms of I'm sure that a lot of our listeners are going to be familiar with the concept of racial capitalism as formulated by various scholars, but you go about defining it slightly differently and even terming it differently as US capitalist racist society. So I'm wondering if you're, if you'd be willing to explain to the listeners your conception of capitalist racist society, how that perhaps differs in some ways from the more well understood conceptions of racial capitalism. And then also there's a couple of other terms that weren't in this section specifically that might, but might also be worth kind of defining here because they are related to one another

in terms of how these structures interact with one another, one of which is structural location of blackness, is something that you talk about throughout the book, as well as Wall Street imperialism as a specific form. I think that these three definitions might be useful to kind of define and talk about the interactions between them for the listeners. Sure. So with capitalist racism, I use that term, I guess to explain it succinctly. So people generally come to the term racial capitalism through Cedric Robinson. And part of Cedric Robinson's argumentation is that the racialism that then became constituent, constituent of the capitalist world system has its origins in like the feudal order. and that the sort of ethno-nationalist forms of differentiation that he points out, a la, between like the British and the Irish and some other groupings actually constitute sort of early racism or racialism.

I don't necessarily agree with that assessment. I think that there are many forms of sort of social differentiation that permeate the feudal order, but that racism in its modern form is something that is ensconced in the capitalist world system and really originates with like racial slavery. And so I also see racial slavery as constitutive of capitalism, not a sort of precondition, which is part of what, why part of the definition of capitalist racism is ongoing primitive accumulation. That primitive accumulation is not a pre-history to capitalism, but it's a particular type of accumulation that is really plunderous, that is constituent of capitalism as such. And so I use capitalist racism to really, because

I'm talking about a form of racism, specifically anti-blackness, anti-black racial oppression, that is, that emanates from capitalism. And so it's really, it's not a rejection of Robinson's position per se, but it's a sort of a refinement of it to sort of talk about what I'm, what, or to be more specific as to what I'm speaking about. And I don't know the exact definition that I use of capitalist racism, but I know it's like expropriation by domination, labor super exploitation, and ongoing primitive accumulation. And what I'm getting at is the intersection of violence and expropriation or violence and surplus value extraction that move beyond the form of surplus value extraction to which the white working class is

subjected. And so I'm looking at the processes that are really rooted in plunder and, you know, the groups that are legitimate. It's like, who's shit? Who shit can you take without recourse? It's not that you're paying them low wages. You're paying them almost nothing. And then part of how that is facilitated is through forms of extraordinary violence, right?

Through forms of obtrusion. And so for me, that is what we need to look at when it comes to capitalist racism. It's like what are the very, what are the forms of what are the processes by which super profit is extracted? Because I think that's very, very important to understanding. capitalist racism. And so that leads to, when I talk about the structural location of blackness, I guess part of what, or the most important thing about that is I was really trying to figure out, like, what is blackness?

And this is important because, for example, like, the group that has sort of popularized anti-blackness as a concept is like the Afro-pessimist. But for me, they don't have a distinction between blackness and anti-blackness. So we have to have a definition of what? blackness is to understand what anti-blackness as a process is. And so for me, it's not race. It's certainly not caste. And I've written an article about why it's not cast, why Cass isn't pertain to the United States. And it's not, even though there's a class dynamic because the U.S. is a class society, you know, because of an exploitative and antagonistic relationship

between labor and capital, it's not reducible to class because often blackness has facilitated cross-class collaboration through the ideology and practices of white supremacy. And so structural location describes both the material relation as well as all of the forms of legitimation and custom that holvelled that subordinated position in place. In terms of Wall Street imperialism, I talk about that as a sort of policy and practice or the highest stage of capitalist racism. And there are kind of five things that I'm describing that the work that Wall Street imperialism does.

The important thing about it is that Wall Street Imperialism is an internal and an external process. That it structures the relationship between the U.S. north and the U.S. South and that the fulcrum of that is the Negro question or the subordination of black people. And that it gives blackness a national

character. And this is where the idea of a black self-determination or a black, the black-built nation thesis that's articulated by the, um, the communist party becomes dangerous, right? So there, so in other words, if Washington imperialism gives the black reality, the black, black, black exploitation of particular, a national character. Um, and then it also had, it also, um, structures U.S. relations abroad. So the relations of dispossession and expropriation, um, that again, make plunder, not diplomatic relationships, the crux of how the U.S. relates, especially to like the racialized world. And the internal piece is really important because what we have to understand, like the work of people like Nick Estes and other indigenous scholars show

us that like the Constitution is an imperial document, that the first sort of imperialist wars were against indigenous nations. And the sort of the takeoff stage of sort of U.S. had to do with the domestic plunder, the ability of the United States to conquer from sea to shining sea, right? And to utilize those endogenous resources that then created the conditions for the need of exporting capital abroad. So to make a short story long, as I always do, Wall Street imperialism is important because it describes both domestic and internationalist relationships that are that are linked and mutually constitutive. So one way that I talk about this, for example, is how the way black people are treated in the South is exported to places like

Haiti when the U.S. occupies Haiti from 1915 to 1934. It completely up it or it completely overlooks whatever the Haitian social relations are and treats all Haitians, irrespective of class position, like it treats black people in the South, including the extreme like labor exploitation. And this has to do with the imperial logic of the U.S. state. So hopefully that gave some clarity to some of that terminology and how those things interact, Washington imperialism, capitalist racism, and then structural location of blackness. Yeah, absolutely. Now that we have some of those, like, core definitions of this text on the table, I want to talk about something that you discuss in Chapter 3. In Chapter 3, you talk about the three genres of radical blackness

that are targeted by the U.S. state. And I found this part very enlightening and interesting. So can you kind of talk about what these three genres of radical blackness are? And importantly, they're interrelations with one another. Yeah. So there's probably more than those three. But basically, when I was reading through all of the archival sources and some of the secondary work, I found that these were the three that really kind of stood out and that were capacious enough to incorporate the construction of these, you know,

these others from within. So the West Indian is someone who is at the intersection of foreignness, radicalism, and blackness. So they really are this trifecta of danger who have a class analysis, an internationalist perspective, as well as a racial analysis, and therefore they're really on the constituentive outside of the U.S. state. And so I talk about Marcus Garvey in this section because and Marcus Garvey is actually really interesting because even though Marcus Garvey, especially by 1921, it's like a staunch anti-communist, he's still red-baited. Like the UNIA is still considered to be a sort of hub of Bolshevik machinations. And this is not least because of the large contingent of West Indians in the Universal

Negro Improvement Association. The West Indian is important because, you know, know, there's this long historical debate about whether West Indians are actually more radical than African Americans at different points in history, specifically because they have the anti-imperialist, anti-class, anti-racial analysis. And certainly it seems that the state agrees with them or agrees with this assessment of the danger of West India's because by 1951, for example, or the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, immigration from the Caribbean was reduced to just 100 people. So Claudia Jones talks about this. And she says, you know, whereas fascist scum are being, from Europe, are being led into the United States in droves. The entire whole of the Caribbean only can have 100 people, you know, immigrate to the United States. The next kind of trope or the next genre is the outside agitator. And this is important because this is like an educated black person. And whereas, you know, ignorant, illiterate black,

are susceptible to foreign influence or outside influence, educated blacks are considered to be amenable to it, right? So they're considered to be these uppity Negroes who are often like newspaper editors or who are some type of race leaders who become dissatisfied with their natural lot and therefore are amenable to or are supportive of these radical ideas. And so they're a different type of vector of subversion, right, or destabilization. And they're particularly dangerous because they're influential, because they're able to spread their ideas from north to south or throughout the United States and even amongst white folks. And so they really are in their, you know, they're erudites. They are articulate and they're convincing. And so therefore, they're really

dangerous. And so A. Philip Randolph in this night, this World War I moment is the sort of archetype of this, A. Philip Randolph and the messenger newspaper, there's so much consternation about its militant and counter-hegemonic tone and its influence. And then we have the red-black, black, red, which I say is like the most odious figure because it's actually a black communist, right? That it's bad enough to be black, it's bad enough to be communist, to be a black communist is just the worst thing you could possibly be. And interestingly, I initially, I initially had the terminology for that it was nigger communist because this was something that Paul Robeson was called when the dire anti-lyn lynching bill was going through Congress in

1921 a senator was saying you know Congress is becoming infested with the ideas of nigger communists right that the anti-lynching bill was the imaginations of this group and then it was also angelo herndon throughout his various trials was referred to as this but outside readers were like, that is probably, you know, people are probably not going to want to read that terminology over and over. So I change this to red, black, black red. But again, this is the most sort of odious figure because they're a member of the Communist Party, which means that they believe in social equality.

They organize interracially. And interracialism is as bad as, you know, it's social equality, right? So how dare black people organize equally with white folks? They're for economic democracy and expropriation. and redistribution. And then again, because they're members of the Communist Party, they're dupes of Moscow, susceptible to foreign influence, and exceptionally dangerous.

And as Brett mentioned, these are not hard and fast categories. Like, they're fungible, right? So somebody like Cyril Briggs would be an outside agitator. So he was one of the founders of the African Blood Brotherhood. He would be an outside agitator as well as a West Indian, as well as a red, black, black red. And so there's some overlap between these genres, but I think what it points out is the sort of scope of danger, the U.S. constructed through radical black people and the very narrow political terrain on which black people had to organize out to try to avoid as best they could being labeled subversives or treasonous or insurrectionists. You mentioned Angelo Herndon, and this is something that you bring up towards the end of chapter three.

You say the case of Angelo Herndon illuminates the red, black, black, red as the most hated genre of radical blackness. So just as a brief follow-up, can you talk a little bit about who Angelo Hernan was and why that case is a good example of how and why the red black, black, red, is the most hated genre of radical blackness to U.S. capitalist racist society? Yeah, so Angela Heardin, he's actually on the cover of the book. Essentially, he was indicted in 1932 under the Georgia anti-insurrection law, which was a law that dated back to enslavement. That was a response to the Nat Turner Rebellion. And essentially, it subjected anybody who was said to be organizing for the overthrow of the state. They were subjected to the death penalty. So Herndon had organized an interracial.

under the auspices of the Unemployment Council in order to keep black and white workers on the unemployment roles so that they didn't lose those benefits. That protest was ultimately successful despite the efforts of city officials to sort of turn black people against white people, et cetera, et cetera. And so a few months after that march, Herndon was arrested. He wasn't initially charged. Finally, they charged him under insurrection because he had in his possession communist literature. And so the Herndon case is important. because it went all the way up to the Supreme Court actually more than one time. But it was the first time that a case of free speech was applied to a black person,

not even to mention a sort of black communist. Ultimately, so initially he was found guilty, but, you know, the Southern justice was that he wouldn't be given the electric chair. He was thrown on a chain gang for 20 years. Through the process of appeals, he ultimately avoided that. The case was overturned by the Supreme Court. But it took several years for that to happen. And so it's important in terms of case law.

So it's Hernevy-Lauri. It's important in terms of case law. But it's also important because he did everything wrong, right? He organized interracially. He organized under the auspices of the Communist Party. And all of this language was used during his trial. You know, the prosecutor talked about, you know, if people like Herndon were not punished, then white daughters, white southern daughters would be threatened that a nigger republic

would be set up in the south and white landowners would be expropriated and that, you know, people like Herndon wanted, you know, they were completely sort of antithetical to the American way of life. And so the other important thing about the Hernden case was that Benjamin Davis, who would later be part of the Smith Act trials, was his lawyer. And that was a lawyer. And that was the international labor defense were intentional about making two young black people, Herndon's lawyers, to really convey the racism and the inability to get a fair trial in a southern court. The other important thing about it is the mass movement.

So the Communist Party is sort of well known or maybe not well known enough that the direct action tactic comes out of cases like the Scottsboro case and the Angela Herndon case. And so they said that we're never going to get judge. justice in capitalist courts, but we can't have justice in the court of public opinion and the court of the people. And so they would, you know, have mass protests and gain or organize for mass support of the Skiesboro Boys or Angela Hardin. And later, what's her name? The sharecropper it's a really big case in 1948. Rosalie Ingram. Anyway, they would, they would But they would organize mass support against what they call legal lynchings in order to mitigate or offset the injustice that they were experiencing in the capitalist courts.

So I could go on and on about this. But that's the importance of Angela Arndon. Yeah, I wanted to pick up on something you had been mentioning about war and Wall Street imperialism. and particularly since you'd also mentioned about Du Bois being seen as particularly subversive for his peace activism. And it just seems that this is an enduring structure and feature of this system that you're identifying that has continuities with subsequent periods of history and the intersection that you talk about, that Du Bois was also very interested in about the interconnection between capitalist, imperialist, and racial kind of war against colored people's abroad and domestic oppression and political repression in this black scare, red scare kind of intersection domestically. And so I was just wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit more about how these

things worked together in this system. And it just reminds me that, you know, black nationalists. like the nation of Islam were identified so much, particularly, you know, by the security state because they were against the draft or tried to evade the draft and, you know, took the position of conscientious objection on religious grounds and so on as a way to undermine from the perspective of the state, the, you know, kind of required unity of support for the war effort, whether it was, you know, even World War II and then particularly, as you were talking about in your discussions of Wall Street imperialism and the threat of peace, the Korean War and the drive to the Korean War and kind of rolling back, you know, international communism through this particular conflict. And we see that today that there's just like such an investment in war in both the liberal, you know, in the liberal establishment, you know,

both in the Ukraine situation, that like talking about peace, you know, has become extremely controversial and, of course, calling for a ceasefire, even today in Israel's assault, a genocidal war on Gaza. So just I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how important and subversive peace activism was seen because of the structure that you're identifying here, this war mongering and Wall Street imperialism. Well, so war is important. It is foundational to the United States rise to global hegemony. So starting in like the 1890s with the Spanish-American war that led ultimately to the U.S. getting its informal colonies from the Philippines to Cuba, to the D.R., etc. Then we've got World War I, right, where the U.S. goes for being a debtor to a creditor nation. Then we've got World War II where you know, in a, you know, in a, you know, in a war one. post-World War II moment. The U.S. U.S.'s hegemony is consolidated. And really, the U.S. is the only country that comes out of both of those world wars in the positive, right? Everybody else is indebted,

which is why the United States is able to, it becomes a sort of global financier by that time. Then we've got the Korean War. So we've got the Cold War. Then we've got the Korean War. Then we've got the, you know, Vietnam War. Then we've got Desert Storm. And so the United States has never not been at war, and this is not even mentioning the forms of low intensity and irregular warfare, like sanctions, like overthrowing other people's governments, like, you know, proxy wars, et cetera, et cetera. And so because war is foundational to how the United States imposes its political will and accumulates wealth and resources and increases its spheres of influence to challenge war is to challenge the United States, right? Even

as the U.S. understands itself as a sort of global, the global mediator, right, the world's police. And so it puts forth itself as the vestibule of peaceful or peaceful international relations or sort of global order when in fact it is the central node in global disorder time. And again, if we look at global conflict, the U.S. is involved in some form or fashion. And so that is why peace becomes sort of anathema to the state. Because if you don't, if you have peace, if you have durable peace, if you have peaceful coexistence, then you don't have the military industrial complex. You don't have, you know, military Keynesianism.

You don't have war-driven profit and accumulation. You don't have the domination of the economy by these private war-making weapons manufacturers. So really the whole of U.S. political economy will be fundamentally disrupted. And part of that call for peace, again, is also a redistributive call. It's saying instead of putting billions of dollars toward warmaking, that money can go toward health care and education and social services and building roads. It can go toward forms of innovation that aren't rooted in death dealing. And of course, that challenges the power of the ruling class. That challenges is the hegemony of, you know, of people whose livelihoods are wrapped up in fundamental

inequality and the polarization of wealth and in the ability to, and in the monopoly on force, if you will. And so this is what makes peace incredibly dangerous. It becomes doubly so when articulated by black people or by racial minorities because it's sort of putting the United States on blast, right? It undermines the way the United States narrates itself as the bestobule of freedom and democracy, right? Because oftentimes what black people do when they're caught when they're partaking war is connecting their horrible conditions domestically with the havoc that the United States is wreaking abroad. And so in this, again, it's considered to be, it's considered to be subversion. So, for example, during World War I, you know, the state was to say that black people's self-defense was even more dangerous or was even more antithetical to the war effort than white terrorism because it was divisive, right?

Or that black people's organizing for equal, you know, for equality in military service or for, you know, equality in defense industries. was more divisive then, was extremely and incredibly divisive, not least because it generated white wrath, right? So that is to say that black people were not only guilty of undermining the war effort. They also were, they brought the violence on themselves. And this is the type, and so then there's this whole other conundrum, right? Because on the one hand, there was, Especially during World War I, there was extreme consternation about arming black people. And in fact, there was a big sort of push against letting black people enter the military and trying to keep them in the South, right? But then on the other hand, if black people draft dodge or protest the war, they're also subversive, right?

Then they are at that moment and then World War I moment, then they are pro-German. were susceptible to German, you know, to German intrigue. And so it's a, it's really a lose, and that just goes to show the fungibility of like the Black scare and the Red Scare through the continued construction of foreign influences, impact on Black people. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to follow up a little bit because it does seem like there's that fungibility that you mentioned. It just exposes how many contradictory investments, you know, like, like how the system is trying to square these circles, you know, because, you know, by the same, at the same time that it's kind of a tool for repression, racial repression domestically, because, oh, we have to all be united because we, you know, we're fighting the Cold War. We can't, you know, have that. And if you're, if you're agitating on for racial equality, you must be a communist because you're trying to weaken America and divide us, right? That kind of thing. But at the same time, also, you know, some have argued that you wouldn't have had maybe in some ways some of the

kind of liberal progress that ends up being made in the, you know, 50s and early mid-60s through that era of, you know, desegregation and civil rights struggles if you didn't have the Cold War context constantly putting pressure on the world stage that America's being so embarrassed for exactly the contradiction and the hypocrisy that you mentioned of like this is supposed to be you know uh this liberal democratic society equality etc but those values are constantly being exposed on the global stage of you know uh you know fire hoses and and dogs being sicked on you know young black protesters and those images being sent around the world and you know in the third world in Africa and you know Asia you know you know Americanism

you know, running up against hostility to, you know, to this. And so it just seems like that is such a kind of contradictory sort of tension that was at stake in there that links the international with the domestic through this racial kind of racial prism. I don't know if you have anything further you wanted to say about it, but it just seemed to me that was really, you know, put a finger on like a really important kind of problematic in this kind of system that you've been talking about of the black scare red scare yeah i'll be i'll just add like so mary duziac for example writes about this about that cold war civil rights yeah exactly like why it's important um because of the sort of the rise of television media on the one hand and because of the sort of internationalization

and the confluence of civil rights struggle on the one hand and then decolonization on the other hand But then, you know, as again, Gerald Bourne explains, as he explains most things, part of how that was accommodated was by was giving the most sort of liberal, anemic, hollowed out rights, specifically through beating back the left. So beating back the more radical claims of economic redistribution of real sort of real racial equality, of actually granting liberty, civil liberties to political minorities that those calls were sort of subsistributed. assumed under a more class-based liberal rights framework that the state did a good job of deracinating from a broader internationalist form of organizing. So I think that what you offered is spot on. Yeah, great discussion. I want to move on to something that you sort of talk about in the book and then sort of pick up a thread that Adnan put down about Palestine. In the book, you talk about the fascistic nature of U.S. capitalist racist society. And I think this is important

because I think sometimes even people on the left imagine, you know, sort of like democratic capitalist liberalism and fascism as two distinct things. But I also think that fascism is sort of the natural ideological framework of a settler colonial entity in particular and of the sort of entity that the U.S. is in general. And so, you know, fascism isn't something fundamentally alienated from the basic functioning of the status quo of American society. It's something that is always there, particularly for black and indigenous people throughout history. And another connection is, of course, the connection that we've seen throughout American history that we also see in Israel today, which is this sort of wild projection of settler colonial

anxieties and shame onto the other and a sort of hysteria. that's obviously racist to its core about this threat posed by the freedom and self-determination of the oppressed. I'm framing something like, you know, in the Israeli context, from the river to the sea, which is a call for decolonization and justice and equality, framing that as a call for genocide while they conduct genocide. And I think that there's some similarities with the U.S. and its history, particularly with black people.

So can you kind of talk about this connection between fascism and American history as well as these similarities between the settler colonial projects of Israel and the settler colonial project of America? Yeah. So that's the fascism question is an interesting one. So I do write about the United States as fascistic. And it's funny because initially I was writing fascist to like. And again, you know, reader, you have these book workshops sometimes. And so people were saying, you know, are you, why are you using this term fascist like? Is it because you don't, you know, want to call the United States fascists. And so I settled on the term fascistic.

But people that I draw on called the United States proto-fascist, fascist-like or outright fascist. And it was never really settled. And I bring that up because I also ambivalent about this, right? Particularly why fascism is our historical analogy, the preeminent historical analogy for wrongs, right, for atrocity. Imperialism preceded the consolidation of fascism, right? Imperialism and the genocidal nature of colonialism preceded the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.

And so on the one hand, there's a way that calling everything fascist can undermine or can overdetermine like that, reality. And of course, people like CLR. James and George Padmore and Amy Cicera really pointed this out that fascism became the ultimate crime because white people began to be treated like the colonized. And so I struggle a little bit. On the other hand, I very much push back against the idea that the United States is not fascistic, right? Because it doesn't fit particular criteria of European forms of fascism or because it fought

against, you know, it fought the Nazis in World War II. We also know they let in a whole bunch of Nazis after World War II. And I didn't fight the Nazis that hard. The Russians did. And so I just want to raise up that ambivalence. I think the

United States, and sometimes we focus too much on fascism, we can skip over the ways that liberal democracy really abets much of those practices of fascism, like the defense of capital against society, like the rabid nationalism, the sexism, et cetera, et cetera. But I settled on connecting what, you know, there's a scholar called Michael Rogan who talks about the counter-siversive political tradition, and that being the sort of nature of a particular type of U.S. fascism, I think it's important to point that out because oftentimes

when we only rely on, when we rely on European models of fascism, we can skip over settler colonialism and slave and post-slave society as modeling the types of practices that became constitutive of places like Italy and Nazi Germany. But I have the same ambivalence today about like Israel, right? That each side is calling the other side Nazis and Hitler. What? Like that can escape the point. We can just say settler colonialism. It doesn't matter if Netanyahu is Hitler or not. He's Netanyahu. Right? It doesn't. And so trying to pull out whether it's fascistic or not, who gives a fuck? Maybe they are a liberal democracy and maybe we need to interrogate why it is that liberal democracy abets and accommodates settler colonialism and

dispossession and genocide. And I also just want to say for the record that another thing that I've tried to push back against is the fact that this is the moment of Palestinian genocide because I write about weak charge genocide. And what they point out is that genocide is not the same as extermination or annihilation. That part of what genocide is is the destruction of a group and whole or impart. And that's been happening at least since 1948. What we're seeing as a war a war-driven intensification of genocide, but the genocide didn't start on October 8th, right? And I think that's really important to note. And again, even terms like genocide, there's these debates, right?

Has it reached the level of genocide? And sometimes this terminology, whether it's fascism or genocide or whatever, can really take away from the matter at hand, whereby you have people try to do this uno reverse of, you know, from the river to the sea, is calling for genocide when an actual. genocide is intensifying before our eyes and so um you know i think it's you know what you point out about secular colonialism is absolutely crucial in the fact that you know i saw this tweet that i thought was really apt people think that from the river to the sea is genocidal because from sea to shining sea was right that that was a genocidal project and so the so there's the complation of a decolonial call with an absolutely, an absolutely imperial

and colonial practice. And that's the fear of white settlers that they're going to get treated how they treated everybody else. But we really need to only look at South Africa. Right? With the end of apartheid. I mean, I have many

critiques of Nessa Mandela for the way that he proceeded about that, but that just goes to show there was no white genocide. There was no white dispossession. thing, you know, black people actually are still suffering. And so, but I think that what South Africa can show is that it doesn't, that the colonized are not the savages and the brutes that they're constructed to beat. The settlers are, and the settlers are scared to be subjected to the very things that are

keeping them, keeping them powerful. Yeah, I just wanted to add on. that on that, I think that's absolutely correct. And I think you're so right to point out that some of the definitional arguments, as a genocide, is it this or is it that, have really distracted from actually dealing with the material, you know, actual issues of horrible, you know, killing, massacres, et cetera, that should be dealt with as a way of avoiding some of that. But on that fascism question, I mean, I think really great points about Amy Cesar and others and about the fear of the settlers about what would happen to them if they were treated the way that they've

been treating the indigenous under colonialism. But also that fascism really emerges in that European context with two countries who consolidated their national state and colonial and imperial projects really late after France, after Dutch, after England. They're latecomers. And so they had to actually create this in Europe. They had to do this, you know, when the world had already been kind of divided up under all of these colonial empires. And so that seems to me a big dividing line. So I really appreciated your point. Why should that be the defining basis for a norm of far-right kind of oppression when there's such a longer history, both before and after. This was a very atypical kind of form, you know, that emerged in a specific context of

two late nation, European nation states trying to get in on the imperialism game. So I really appreciated that remark. I think good history would try and draw those distinctions. And so maybe let's just use the settler colonialism, which is why, and I think that is a much more capacious kind of analytical framework, which is why we're seeing so much pushback right now against characterizing this as settler colonialism in current political discourse, that that is genocidal or that is, you know, somehow beyond the pale to identify Israel, for example, as a settler colonial state. I mean, I just want to add, too, I think that part of what's missing from the fascism conversation is the anti-communism that literally the first groups in both

Italy and in Germany that were attacked were well labor militants so unions right and communists that these people were wiped out and so part of I think what's missing from the current discussion and again it's just that it's the it's the inaccuracy of the analysis or the the sort of the piecemeal way that people are now analyzing fascism, people are just, you know, it's kind of like, well, liberals are being, you know, student organizations are being shut down, which is true, right? Liberals are being attacked for, you know, they're being dismissed from their jobs. Okay. But it is the repression of the left that is really the canary and the coal mine for the rise of fascism. And somehow that's falling out of the conversation. And so that's

something that I think we also need to be mindful of and analyze. And if it is that we're going to define this moment as fascist, we really need to pay attention to what's happening there. That also connects very closely with the subject of your book then about, you know, the way in which the red square was so important repression of left organizing, communist organizing, that maybe this is really, maybe you did come up with the right term to call it fascistic because that is a much closer thread with what you see in Nazi Germany and, you know, and Mussolini's, you know, Italy is, of course, that repression of the communists. Yeah. And that's happening exactly in this period in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to follow up to move us on here. So since

we're talking about anti-communism, that's a good segue to the second half of the book, which in large part is about anti-communism as a mode of governance. And as a mode of governance, we and the various branches of the United States' government. So I'm just going to leave the question pretty open for you to play around with because it is such a big part of the second half of the book, Professor. But can you talk about how anti-communism is used as a mode of governance within the U.S. capitalist racist society? Yeah.

So a lot of that section is a part. So there's this piece by William Patterson where he talks about how all three branches of government at both the federal and the state level really collude to to ensure this sort of repressive society, right? And that it is a society that's weaponized against racial minorities and political minorities. And so part of what I wanted to show in that section is that it's the legislative branch. So, for example, through the legislative branches where we get like the cacophony of

legislation. We've got the Foreign Agents Registration Act. We've got the Hatch Act, the Warhees Act, the Smith Act, the McCarran Act, the McCarran Walter Act, the Communist Control Act, and so much legislation that's passed. And so many of these laws that begin to be passed in the 1930s and during and after World War II, harking back to the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act, which are wartime acts. that really criminalized dissent in manifold forms. And so the other way that we see the legislative branch active and anti-communist governance is through these committees, right? So you've got the House Committee on American Activities, the Fish Committee, the Dice Committee, the McCormick-Dickenstein Committee,

the Subversive Activities Control Board, the Senate, Internal Security, Subcommittee, et cetera, et cetera, you've got all of these committees. Then you've got the, it's through the legislative branch that we see. like the FBI is part of the legislative branch, as is the Bureau of Investigation, as are these executive orders that are handed down by people like Harry Truman that require like a loyalty oath, and that create the conditions for the attorney general's list of subversive organizations. And then with, you know, the attorneys general are part of that executive branch. And so that is where we see a lot of activity coming from. And then there's a lot of cross-pollinization as well.

So J. Edgar Hoover, who is the head of the B.I. and the FBI is a constant witness for these committees. He is consulting with the attorneys general. He is working with people like Joseph McCarthy and Rankin and Eastland and Strom Thurmond, etc. Then you have the judicial branch. What's important about the judicial branch is both action and inaction. And so part of what I argue about the Supreme Court is the way that they're active and anti-communist and the legislation. legislation is sometimes through, um, it's sometimes through jurisprudence, but often through kicking things back to the states, right? So they, they fail to take up cases that were protect racial and political minorities and kick it back to the very states that, um, are, um, hell bent on keeping, you know, racial hierarchy intact and that are very hostile to political

minorities. And that the state level anti-communism becomes especially important, like in the 1920s and early 1930s, for example, because of the failure to pass a peacetime anti-sedition bill. And so that's where we see like states like New York, Texas, a bunch of states pass these anti-communist laws in order to appropriate a lot of resources toward targeting radicals. whether they be Bolsheviks, anarchists, syndicalists, et cetera. And so the other thing I talk about in that section is anti-communism from above and anti-communism from below. And anti-communism from below is the sort of civil society

and the quotidian ways that anti-communism operates. Because there's often an understanding of simply the top-down nature, but we have to understand is that people elect officials, right? that people who are in churches, in schools, who are business leaders, that these people are also driving anti-communism. And this is the anti-communism from below. And then there's sort of a societal self-regulation that comes out of the dragging out of anti-communist legislation policy and practice.

And so then people begin to sort of, for example, kick anybody suspected of of communism out of their organization. They won't rent homes to these people. They won't hire them. They'll fire them with impunity. People are snitching on their neighbors. They're cooperating with the government. And all of this is sort of a way for people to try to protect themselves,

but then also to perform this true Americanism or this patriotism that they hope will shield them from being accused. And also, you know, many people do believe. and that communists are the devil for some reason, right? Many of these people are very hostile to racial equality. And so it's easy to blame the communists or some type of foreign entity for, you know, riling up the blacks than it is to accept that keeping, you know, racial subordination is really untenable without pushback. The colonized, the oppressor, always going to rise up at some point.

And it is a function of their material conditions. It's not the function of some foreign. plot. So, you know, the upshot of that of talking about anti-communism as a mode of governance is that it's not just attitudes. It's not just belief. It's not just the personal vendetta of somebody like McCarthy or of Hoover that the state is very much invested in this mode of governance primarily because it's a way to connect to suture like anti-radicalism to to Americanism, right? It's a way to really put forth that in order to belong, to be a real citizen,

to be able to fully exercise your rights and liberties, you have to really believe in and promote the dogma of the U.S. state apparatus. Yeah, and this next question, I think, is perfectly segued by your answer to the last, which is this concept of true Americanism. In the text, you call it the legitimizing architecture of U.S. capitalist racist society, you know, this idea of who isn't a true American. So can you kind of talk about how that's been deployed throughout American history and how it's still being deployed to today, up to the present? Yeah, so, you know, true Americans, they go to church, they work hard, they support every form of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. They, you know, close ranks between capital and labor.

They don't sow division by through things like protesting racial inequality. And they believe that the U.S. way of life is the best way to be in the world. And that any challenge to that way of being in the world is dangerous. And that any, you know, state violence that's needed out or that is used to challenge. challenge those challenges is legitimate. And so we see, I mean, we see it. It is happening right now in real time, right? The U.S. state says Israel has a right to defend itself. And if you do not agree with that, if you challenge that in any way, rather you're saying from the river to the sea, whether you're calling for a ceasefire, whether you're calling out a genocide, whether

their students are organizing for the basic humanity of Palestinians, you are considered an enemy of the state, right? And then so much propaganda is built up around that lie or, you know, whatever, that position that the U.S. state takes, that people become sort of acculturated to believe that what is being said is true, even when there's so much evidence of the contrary. And then if you disagree with what is said, if you disagree with this, you know, true Americanism with this American position, then you've no longer have rights, right? Your rights can be abdicated. So you no longer have the freedom of assembly. Your organizations are canceled.

You no longer have freedom of speech because you are thrown in jail or you lose your job. You no longer have freedom of association. All of these things are abdicated when, because those things only apply to true Americans. they only apply to U.S. citizens, despite the contrary, despite what it says in the Constitution in practice, they only apply to the true Americans. And so there's a repressive apparatus that is anti-communism, but true Americanism is the positive program, right? So you have to beat back all that is bad. But then you have to offer up something else, right? You have to offer up a way to perform belonging, a way to assert your, not only your willingness to participate in the status

quo, but your worthiness of being an American. And that is what true Americanism does. And of course, it does that through building up antitheses through the Black Scare and the Red Scare. This is a really quick follow-up. Is there any sense in which, or I don't know, what your thoughts are on this, like that black people or some segment of them can become quote unquote true Americans because I think with the with the Republican right today I mean and a long history of this as well there's a certain sort a type of black person who will be perhaps conditionally accepted into the realm of a true American I don't know if you have any thoughts on that yeah it's it is true right so there is sort of there's this term like

shot him for the right and so I think that this is practiced by a certain segment of the black petty bourgeoisie through black conservatism but also through a particular type of black liberalism a la hakeem jeffreys in this whole and van jones who is weeby van as i like to call in right um where you have to delight in the suffering of other blacks or those blacks or those radicals in order to have to protect yourself right but the gag is that you will be turned on at any given moment, if you look at what's happening sort of with Candace Owens right now, right? She said one thing about genocide, she's still a fucking dole. But she said this one thing about genocide and now look, the right has turned on her. Ben Shapiro has turned on her.

And so because she's still provisional, right? And black people just become the face of failure, whether it's the failure of whatever the ideology is, right? And so even when it comes, when it comes to Zionism, black Zionists get the brunt of like the vitriol as the ultimate traitors, just as sort of black pro-Palestinian activists become the face of, you know, that perfidy. So you have, for example, like the faces of black student activists here in Cambridge on the sides of trucks. And so you can try to perform this. You can try to perform this true Americanism and people have been you know have had varying degrees of success like like a Barack Obama but it's it's provisional and it's reversible so like it's always already

suspect yeah so since you're talking about true Americanism and as we're getting close to the end of the conversation here I'm actually going to take us back to the epilogue of the book which is where we began the conversation with and talking about black identity extremis And there's a little extract from here that, again, I would like to read to, again, show the listeners that this is a very well-written book, you know, from, again, a literary standpoint as well. But it does tie together this, you know, this new kind of idea of black identity extremists with this idea of true Americanism versus un-Americanism. You say, relatedly in an FBI memo, black identity extremists are defined as individuals who seek holy or in part through unlawful acts of, force or violence in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society to establish a separate black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities, or governing

organization within the United States. This recourse to force or violence also recapitulated the discourse of revolutionary radicalism and the Attorney General report. Additionally, the emphasis on a separate black homeland and black autonomy as encompassing threats to the U.S. government drew on similar legitimating architecture used throughout the 1920s to deport Marcus Garvey and to demonize the CPUSA's Black Belt Nation thesis. The insistence, moreover, that ideology, as opposed to alleged acts of police abuse, motivated BIE action was reminiscent of claims during the Black Scare, Red Scare, Long, DeRay, that those who defied true Americanism were susceptible to un-American, foreign,

and or outside ideologies like communism, socialism, and black nationalism, and we're therefore actually or potentially subversive. This comes from a longer extract that I could read more from, but I'm just going to recommend the listeners to read it. But in the next section, you talk about the Black Liberation Army as well, and just to mention that we have an episode on historic documents of the Black Liberation Army that we put out with our comrades at Rookery Press. So, listeners, if you're interested in those documents,

documents and our episode on that, you can find that in the guerrilla history feed. But just to kind of tie these two together, can you talk a little bit about this conceptualization of black identity extremism and tying that into this true Americanism versus un-Americanism paradigm that you were laying out in the last couple of answers that you've been going through? Yeah. So black identity extremists are kind of like, so really there's the communist, then you have the kind of midway step of extremists.

of extremists and then you have the terrorists. That this is a kind of like, um, development of dangerous others. But, but black identity extremists are considered to be those who, um, challenged the orthodoxy of the state. And so they shoot up police, for example, right? They want to establish an independent homeland. So that's like, or are they, and they consider themselves to be sort of, um, not American. So, so part of, part of in that black identity extremist report is like the moors so there's this group of like people who say i guess they're Moroccan or something that their citizenship is not u.s and therefore they're not subjected to u.s. laws and so therefore they're considered to be antagonistic to the

united states right black identity extremists are also those who want independent institutions so again sewing dissent separating themselves from the larger state apparatus pointing out the violence and the inequality in U.S. society, which is anti-American and un-American, if you're doing it outside of the confines of liberalism, right? If you're doing it outside of an accepted linear progress narrative, that you're showing that this is not, like, if you are arguing that racism isn't, is sort of an aberration to the overall otherwise positive U.S. political project, then that's one thing. But if you're arguing that, no, racism is. endemic in the United States and black people can never achieve equality under this system.

And therefore, if we need to have alternatives, including parallel institutions or a separate nation, then you are an American. Then you are anti-American. And the BLA is important because they were the first group that was referred to as like identity extremists in the 1960s and 1970s. And so it just shows the sort of continuity in the way that the FBI recycles the terminology and again it's it's flexibility and durability um in terms of identifying others in terms of identifying people who are who are dangerous and also what that black identity extremist report is doing is constructing a long history of black people um being um dangerous to the state right so they're linking a what's happening in a post Ferguson moment to all the way back to the

1970s and saying like this is still happening and it's been ongoing and it's been a way that black folks have positioned themselves vis-a-vis the U.S. state. And then of course the Black Liberation Army was some variation of like Marxist Leninists or Maoist as many of those groups were, which again shows the if not the susceptibility to foreign ideology, then the acceptance of it, right? The outside agitators, the amenability to that type of thinking that if blackness was already suspect, it then turns blackness from suspects to dangerous. Yeah. So in getting us out of this conversation, I just am going to quote from the book one more time. It's actually the closing words of the book, which I think are

wonderful words to read us out on and help us to reflect on this conversation and on this work, which of course the listeners should pick up. You say the black scare and the red scare in their permutations continue to encourage the invention of which words, as Du Bois put, put it, from black identity extremist to terrorist to critical race theory to wokeism. They also ossify and reintroduce old enemies of the state like Marxist, communist, and the N-word. The black scare and the red scare still undergird the transformation of radical organizers, activists, and scholars into boogeymen to rationalize racial, economic, police, military, and ideological violence in other words, to maintain and reproduce U.S. capitalist racist society.

Again, the book was Black Scare, Red Scare, Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by our wonderful, wonderful guest, Dr. Cherise Burden Steli, honestly, one of our favorite scholars that's operating today. We really appreciate all of the work that you do. We appreciate the activism that you do, the organizing that you do as well as the actual scholarship that you do like this work. All that you do is highly appreciated, highly vital. And of course, the listeners should keep up with all of the work that you're putting out in the work that you're doing because it is really critical and we do truly appreciate all that you do. So thank you very much, Dr. CBS. Can you tell the listeners how they can find the book and keep up with all of the

other things that you're up to? Sure. And thank you all so much for having me for a generative conversation. Where you can find me, I am on social media in various places, but I use a lot of profanity. So don't even follow me there. Just listen, just look up the blackel lives for peace.com or in the Black Alives for Peace Solidarity Network. Join up with your local organizations. That's much more important than following my errant rubbish on social media. I do if you want So I upload quite a lot of my works on my website, doctor dash cvs.com. So a bunch of my articles and public writings are located there. And theoretically, I'm working on another book project of mutual comradeship.

I am eight months pregnant. So I'm really working on a baby. And bringing that into the world, raising up a revolutionary. And so the work has slowed down somewhat. but I am working on a book project on mutual comradeship and another smaller project. I'm here at Harvard on Fellowship, working on a smaller project, comparing the McCarthyist conjuncture. So the early to mid-50s to the 60s and 70s and the forms of analysis around imperialism, war,

triple oppression, and fascism that came out of these two periods to show the sort of continuities between like the old left and new left modes of analysis. So those are things to look for in the coming probably years. So, yeah, but, you know, join an organization, free Palestine. Yeah. And I think it goes without saying that as each of those projects come to fruition, you're going to be back on our show, whether you like it or not to talk about them. Absolutely.

Hopefully you like it. But we are bringing you back either way. way. So thanks again, Dr. CBS. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other podcast? Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, probably less flamboyant and not as much swearing, but, you know, hopefully people can find it interesting. And of course, you can listen to my other podcast, which I hope to get back up and running with an episode on the history of the Ood, wonderful instrument. It's called called the M-H-L-I-S, and you can follow it on all the usual platforms.

Excellent. Looking forward to that conversation on the Ood. It's one of my favorite instruments, to be honest with you. And Adnan says that he's not that flamboyant on Twitter, but the whole situation in Gaza has really fired up Adnan in very generative and encouraging ways. We see some life from you online Adnan. So the listeners, this is, if you are ever going to follow Adnan on social media,

Now is the time because he is highlighting some pretty critical issues with regards to the genocidal actions of the settler colonial so-called state of Israel in Gaza. Brett, how can the listeners follow you and find all of your wonderful work that you put out? Yeah, well, first of all, thank you again so much, Dr. CBS. It's a real honor. We all wish you the absolute best to you and your growing family. It's beautiful. And as for everything that I do, you can find it at Revolutionary Left Radio.com,

including my Twitter in which I do also curse quite a bit. Yeah, Brett's primary, you know, usage of Twitter is essentially just mocking morons. And by morons, I mean like really stupid, but popular reactionaries and politicians on there, which, I mean, they are the quintessential definition of moron. So make sure that you follow Brett on Twitter and check his replies rather than like look at his timeline.

because the replies are really where it's at with them. As for me, listeners, you can find me at H-U-C-K-1-995, where I, unfortunately, am tweeting far more often than I would like to be these days, but yeah, you know, you do what you've got to do. As for the show, you can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-Square-Pod, and you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by supporting us at Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.