Bill Mullen is the co-author with Jeanelle K Hope of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. He spoke to Judy Cox about anti-blackness, fascism and resistance.
By Judy Cox
Friday 15 November 2024
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue
Anti-racism
Anti-racism
The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition
In our book, Jeanelle and I wanted to show the history of black anti-fascism in the United States and globally.
The black anti-fascist tradition connects every important black movement of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Black people have often been the first and most deeply injured by fascism, whether it’s Italian fascism in north Africa, American Nazis attacking civil rights marchers or white supremacist groups targeting Black Lives Matter activists.
Black resistance to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was visible in London, the Caribbean and New York, led by black communists like George Padmore.
Over 100 black people from the US fought against General Franco during the Spanish Civil War by joining the Lincoln Brigades.
For young black men growing up in the South, fighting fascism was an internationalisation of the black struggle for freedom.
Black leader W.E.B. Du Bois was in Germany in the 1930s, writing articles that analysed and warned against the Nazis.
The Black Panther Party organised a United Front Against Fascism conference in 1969. Some 5,000 activists turned up. They developed a black power anti-fascism.
Each of these moments helped to generate new ideas and a new awareness of the threat posed by fascism.
Today, fascists target abolitionists and Black Lives Matter groups.
That is crucial to understanding Trumpism and the rise of the far right since the Charlottesville protests and the murder of Heather Heyer in 2017.
There is a pernicious racist and far right history of the US, and globally there is the rise of neo-fascism and authoritarian parties. We need to recover that black radical tradition to fight back.
We also show that anti-blackness is a key element of fascism. Walter Rodney and Aime Cesaire both wrote about how fascism emerged out of European colonialism in Africa.
Cesaire argued that the tactics used against black populations in Africa came home to roost with fascist movements in Europe.
The Nazis banned Jews from interracial marriages, restricted their right to use public facilities, legalised discrimination at work and stripped them of their right to vote.
This was all taken from the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in the US South.
The erasure of Native Americans was also a huge inspiration to the Nazis.
The whole idea of lebensraum—a Nazi term for military expansionism—was Hitler’s version of this ethnic cleansing.
This was enabled by laws that allowed the theft of land, the suppression of rights, the tearing up of treaties and betrayal of the idea of legality itself.
The slave codes of the 18th century enshrined anti-blackness in the law. Enslaved people were not allowed to grow food, learn to read or earn money. Slavery played a founding role in establishing race laws and influenced fascism globally.
After slavery, new laws sanctioned white supremacy, backed up by racial terrorism and lynchings.
To understand fascism, you have to look beyond inter-war Europe and recentre Africa and North America.
Whatever fascism is and has been, it will always be a white supremacist and nativist movement. Contemporary white power movements in the US all made the Black Lives Matter movement their target.
A few weeks before the January riots at Capitol Hill, the same people were marching through Washington DC, a predominantly black area.
They went to a church associated with Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist activist. They tore down and burnt BLM signs.
Trump is the embodiment of white supremacy and far right politics.
Anti-blackness is intimately linked to the history of colonialism and they both generate fascism. That’s why we have Fortress Europe. Closing the borders on former colonial subjects is central to the new far right. Anti-black sentiment feeds into anti-Muslim ideas and Islamophobia. It targets our darker brothers and sisters.
In France, anti-black fascism draws on the history of north Africa and Algeria in particular. It is the fear of return of the colonial repressed. The rhetoric is about dark people coming in and raping our wives and mothers. Ideas like those are rooted deep in histories of colonialism and slavery.
There are consistent ingredients of fascism, like hostility to mixed race relationships, nativism and attacking the working class—and anti-black sentiment is another essential ingredient.
In 1951, a group of black radicals in the Civil Rights Congress organised the We Charge Genocide petition.
It applied the newly minted United Nations definition of human rights to the US treatment of black people—slavery, police violence, lynching—which they argued constituted a “slow genocide” or “premature death”.
The Civil Rights Congress emerged out of Communist Party groups and was led by black activists like Du Bois and Claudia Jones.
In 2013, a small group of black radical activists in Chicago wanted to draw attention to police torture in their city. They also named their group We Charge Genocide.
Now we have the genocide charges against Israel from the International Court of Justice. We think the original We Charge Genocide petition helps people understand the value of these charges, especially as they come from South Africa, an epicentre of anti-blackness in the 20th century.
Cedric Robinson argued that living under and resisting racial capitalism made black radicals “prematurely” aware of fascism’s history.
So, Ida B Wells—who was active from the late 19th century—was “prematurely anti-fascist” when she linked lynching in the southern states of the US with pogroms against Jews in Europe. She predicted the political future of racist violence.
Anti-blackness has always played an important part in fascist movements.
Historically, fascism aimed to destroy working class organisations. Racism means that black people have always been more likely to have working class jobs. So it follows that many of the most important figures in the black anti-fascist tradition were socialists and communists who wanted to smash the hierarchies of both race and class.
Back in the 1970s, Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker argued that fascism is counterrevolution that aims to preempt a socialist transformation of society.
The rise of fascism is not a single event, a coup d’etat, it is a drawn-out social process.
Fascism feeds on the state repression of black, Puerto Rican and Chicano communities. It feeds on racial capitalism and the incarceration of countless hundreds of black and brown workers and on anti-immigrant racism.
Ukrainian refugees were welcomed in the US. At the same time Trump gave a speech opposing immigration from what he called “shithole” countries, meaning the Global South. He told the crowd, “We should have more people coming from Norway.” He stopped just short of saying “Nordic Aryans”.
Our book focuses on how the black anti-fascist tradition developed strategies for resisance, revolution and survival. It is a tradition of life-making in opposition to fascism’s march to genocide.
The black anti-fascist tradition is about contesting fascism and about building and sustaining radical forms of solidarity and to create new ways of living.
The Democratic Party has been an enormous enabler of the right. For the last ten to fifteen years it has stood by as white supremacists have built up their power. It made peace with Trumpism during Trump’s first term.
Kamala Harris was a leading voice for genocide. She helped enable racial terror and state violence in Palestine. Her support for the genocide is a significant reason she lost.
The Republican Party has a fascist current in it. It is trying to win hegemony.
Trump did not act like a fascist during his first term. But he is a master of dog whistling to fascist and neo-fascists to bring them into his movement.
Trumpism is a very successful right wing social movement. It wants to kick down the door as far as possible to authoritarian rule. Anti-fascists must now be prepared to hit the streets again.
The law won’t save you from fascism. Germany and Italy had sophisticated legal structures. But the courts side with the ruling class.
The Supreme Court is on Trump’s side. It is possible he will try to implement a legal-bureaucratic grab for power. One thing we can say, fascism is anti-democratic at its core and Trump is highly anti-democratic.
Now that Trump has won, we will also see new layers of people who will feel disengaged from official politics and look to the left.
No-one is going to come save us. We have to save ourselves.
Bill Mullen is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Purdue University in the United States. He is a member of the revolutionary socialist organisation Socialist Horizon and the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
In our book, Jeanelle and I wanted to show the history of black anti-fascism in the United States and globally.
The black anti-fascist tradition connects every important black movement of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Black people have often been the first and most deeply injured by fascism, whether it’s Italian fascism in north Africa, American Nazis attacking civil rights marchers or white supremacist groups targeting Black Lives Matter activists.
Black resistance to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was visible in London, the Caribbean and New York, led by black communists like George Padmore.
Over 100 black people from the US fought against General Franco during the Spanish Civil War by joining the Lincoln Brigades.
For young black men growing up in the South, fighting fascism was an internationalisation of the black struggle for freedom.
Black leader W.E.B. Du Bois was in Germany in the 1930s, writing articles that analysed and warned against the Nazis.
The Black Panther Party organised a United Front Against Fascism conference in 1969. Some 5,000 activists turned up. They developed a black power anti-fascism.
Each of these moments helped to generate new ideas and a new awareness of the threat posed by fascism.
Today, fascists target abolitionists and Black Lives Matter groups.
That is crucial to understanding Trumpism and the rise of the far right since the Charlottesville protests and the murder of Heather Heyer in 2017.
There is a pernicious racist and far right history of the US, and globally there is the rise of neo-fascism and authoritarian parties. We need to recover that black radical tradition to fight back.
We also show that anti-blackness is a key element of fascism. Walter Rodney and Aime Cesaire both wrote about how fascism emerged out of European colonialism in Africa.
Cesaire argued that the tactics used against black populations in Africa came home to roost with fascist movements in Europe.
The Nazis banned Jews from interracial marriages, restricted their right to use public facilities, legalised discrimination at work and stripped them of their right to vote.
This was all taken from the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in the US South.
The erasure of Native Americans was also a huge inspiration to the Nazis.
The whole idea of lebensraum—a Nazi term for military expansionism—was Hitler’s version of this ethnic cleansing.
This was enabled by laws that allowed the theft of land, the suppression of rights, the tearing up of treaties and betrayal of the idea of legality itself.
The slave codes of the 18th century enshrined anti-blackness in the law. Enslaved people were not allowed to grow food, learn to read or earn money. Slavery played a founding role in establishing race laws and influenced fascism globally.
After slavery, new laws sanctioned white supremacy, backed up by racial terrorism and lynchings.
To understand fascism, you have to look beyond inter-war Europe and recentre Africa and North America.
Whatever fascism is and has been, it will always be a white supremacist and nativist movement. Contemporary white power movements in the US all made the Black Lives Matter movement their target.
A few weeks before the January riots at Capitol Hill, the same people were marching through Washington DC, a predominantly black area.
They went to a church associated with Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist activist. They tore down and burnt BLM signs.
Trump is the embodiment of white supremacy and far right politics.
Anti-blackness is intimately linked to the history of colonialism and they both generate fascism. That’s why we have Fortress Europe. Closing the borders on former colonial subjects is central to the new far right. Anti-black sentiment feeds into anti-Muslim ideas and Islamophobia. It targets our darker brothers and sisters.
In France, anti-black fascism draws on the history of north Africa and Algeria in particular. It is the fear of return of the colonial repressed. The rhetoric is about dark people coming in and raping our wives and mothers. Ideas like those are rooted deep in histories of colonialism and slavery.
There are consistent ingredients of fascism, like hostility to mixed race relationships, nativism and attacking the working class—and anti-black sentiment is another essential ingredient.
In 1951, a group of black radicals in the Civil Rights Congress organised the We Charge Genocide petition.
It applied the newly minted United Nations definition of human rights to the US treatment of black people—slavery, police violence, lynching—which they argued constituted a “slow genocide” or “premature death”.
The Civil Rights Congress emerged out of Communist Party groups and was led by black activists like Du Bois and Claudia Jones.
In 2013, a small group of black radical activists in Chicago wanted to draw attention to police torture in their city. They also named their group We Charge Genocide.
Now we have the genocide charges against Israel from the International Court of Justice. We think the original We Charge Genocide petition helps people understand the value of these charges, especially as they come from South Africa, an epicentre of anti-blackness in the 20th century.
Cedric Robinson argued that living under and resisting racial capitalism made black radicals “prematurely” aware of fascism’s history.
So, Ida B Wells—who was active from the late 19th century—was “prematurely anti-fascist” when she linked lynching in the southern states of the US with pogroms against Jews in Europe. She predicted the political future of racist violence.
Anti-blackness has always played an important part in fascist movements.
Historically, fascism aimed to destroy working class organisations. Racism means that black people have always been more likely to have working class jobs. So it follows that many of the most important figures in the black anti-fascist tradition were socialists and communists who wanted to smash the hierarchies of both race and class.
Back in the 1970s, Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker argued that fascism is counterrevolution that aims to preempt a socialist transformation of society.
The rise of fascism is not a single event, a coup d’etat, it is a drawn-out social process.
Fascism feeds on the state repression of black, Puerto Rican and Chicano communities. It feeds on racial capitalism and the incarceration of countless hundreds of black and brown workers and on anti-immigrant racism.
Ukrainian refugees were welcomed in the US. At the same time Trump gave a speech opposing immigration from what he called “shithole” countries, meaning the Global South. He told the crowd, “We should have more people coming from Norway.” He stopped just short of saying “Nordic Aryans”.
Our book focuses on how the black anti-fascist tradition developed strategies for resisance, revolution and survival. It is a tradition of life-making in opposition to fascism’s march to genocide.
The black anti-fascist tradition is about contesting fascism and about building and sustaining radical forms of solidarity and to create new ways of living.
The Democratic Party has been an enormous enabler of the right. For the last ten to fifteen years it has stood by as white supremacists have built up their power. It made peace with Trumpism during Trump’s first term.
Kamala Harris was a leading voice for genocide. She helped enable racial terror and state violence in Palestine. Her support for the genocide is a significant reason she lost.
The Republican Party has a fascist current in it. It is trying to win hegemony.
Trump did not act like a fascist during his first term. But he is a master of dog whistling to fascist and neo-fascists to bring them into his movement.
Trumpism is a very successful right wing social movement. It wants to kick down the door as far as possible to authoritarian rule. Anti-fascists must now be prepared to hit the streets again.
The law won’t save you from fascism. Germany and Italy had sophisticated legal structures. But the courts side with the ruling class.
The Supreme Court is on Trump’s side. It is possible he will try to implement a legal-bureaucratic grab for power. One thing we can say, fascism is anti-democratic at its core and Trump is highly anti-democratic.
Now that Trump has won, we will also see new layers of people who will feel disengaged from official politics and look to the left.
No-one is going to come save us. We have to save ourselves.
Bill Mullen is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Purdue University in the United States. He is a member of the revolutionary socialist organisation Socialist Horizon and the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
No comments:
Post a Comment