Interview

Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s Not Enough to Abolish ICE — We Have to Abolish the Police


“What’s happening now has happened before,” Kelley said, underscoring the anti-Blackness foundational to US fascism.

By George Yancy , 

Truthout

PublishedFebruary 26, 2026

A protester holds a sign reading "Black Lives Matter Fuera ICE. 2 Struggles 1 Fight."

Sarah-Ji via Flickr

Under Donald Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has started appearing ever more like a private militia, unleashing brutal violence against families and displaying sycophantic loyalty to Trump as he mandates the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants.

In the days since January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti and 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, it’s not surprising that ICE has begun drawing even more frequent comparison to Hitler’s fascist Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

As I’ve borne witness to these tragedies, I’ve often thought about how Black people meet this moment with an already-acute sense of what it means to live and die under the U.S.’s fascistic logics. For Black people, there were no killers in brown shirts, but there were plenty of killers in white sheets sanctioned through the support, encouragement, and participation of white law enforcement officers. The depth and complexity of what I’m feeling and thinking about this brutal historical resonance cries out for clarity and truth-telling. It is for this reason that I reached out to Robin D. G. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and author of several renowned books, including his newest and forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life.

George Yancy: Robin, it is always an honor. As you said to Amy Goodman, “Jim Crow itself is a system of fascism, when you think about the denial of basic rights for whole groups of people, the way in which race is operating as a kind of nationalism against some kind of enemy threat, the corralling of human beings in ghettos. I mean, this is what we’ve been facing for a long time.” The point here is that this isn’t new. And we mustn’t forget. In The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen write, “On December 17, 1951, the US Civil Rights Congress, headed by Communist attorney William Patterson, presented a 240-page petition to the United Nations general assembly, entitled ‘We Charge Genocide.’” The charge of genocide was necessary, as it continues to be, because of the terror of anti-Blackness in this country, a form of terror that renders Black life fundamentally precarious and vulnerable to the forces of gratuitous state violence. I often fail to find the discourse to frame the ongoing history of anti-Blackness in this country. We’re not just talking about anti-Black beliefs and attitudes; it’s anti-Black fascism. I would like for you to talk about how war is an apt concept for critically thinking about the meaning and reality of anti-Blackness in the past and in the present.

Robin D. G. Kelley: Absolutely! No question! Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism, which as you acknowledged, not only precedes the so-called “classical” fascism in Italy and Germany, but for Hitler and the Third Reich, a model for the racist and antisemitic Nuremberg laws. By the way, Robyn Maynard, a brilliant scholar/organizer, has an essay coming out in the Boston Review that maps out the history of anti-Blackness in U.S. immigration policies.

“Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism.”

To your question, there are so many examples. Beginning in the present, we must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population, Africans. It didn’t matter that the vast majority were U.S. citizens. Trump denigrated the entire community as “garbage” and declared: “I don’t want them in our country.” If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.

Let’s also remember that the core anti-immigrant dog whistle that both Trump and JD Vance exploited in the run-up to the elections targeted Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who had temporary protected status. The racist lies that Haitians were eating their (white) neighbors’ dogs (a literal dog whistle!) was strategic and, apparently, it worked.


“We must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’ in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population.”

But we can’t put all of this on Trump. Besides the long, long history of political, economic, military, and discursive war against the Haitian people, I can never erase the image of Haitian asylum seekers who had taken shelter under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, being violently herded and brutalized by ICE agents on horses, as if they were fugitive slaves. It was the Biden-Harris administration, let’s not forget, that denied Haitians asylum and deported them in record numbers. More Haitians were deported under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their first few weeks in office than under Trump during his entire first term. Now, some might argue that Biden and Harris expanded the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program, which grants “parole” to eligible migrants waiting for visas (dig the carceral language), but all this means is that they were granted temporary protections that forced them into low-wage, precarious work since their status was contingent on having a job, any job.

Let’s come back to the present. We all learned of the horrific murder of 43-year-old Keith Porter Jr. here in Southern California on New Year’s Eve. In case readers don’t know the story, Porter stepped outside his apartment and did what a lot of people do: fired off a few celebratory rounds from his rifle into the sky. Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent who had recently moved into the same complex, wasn’t having it, so he put on his tactical gear, grabbed his weapons, went outside without identifying himself, and fatally shot Porter. The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] officers dispatched to the scene never asked Palacios to surrender his weapon, never gave him a sobriety test, didn’t investigate anything, really. The Department of Homeland Security’s liar-in-chief, Tricia McLaughlin, spun the incident as a “brave officer” taking out an “active shooter” after an exchange of gunfire. It just wasn’t true; every eyewitness confirmed there was no “exchange” of fire or hostilities. It was murder.


“If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.”

This happened a week before Renee Nicole Good’s death, and yet Porter’s name is not mentioned among the martyrs of the anti-ICE resistance, except when Black folks complain about it. Not to take anything away from the extraordinary sacrifice made by Good and Pretti, but Porter was not white and he was not killed in the act of trying to stop ICE and protect his neighbors. Whereas Porter, much like George Floyd, was rendered a victim whose worthiness was constantly called into question, Good and Pretti were martyrs with whom it is impossible not to empathize.

Porter’s family and friends were pressed to do what Black families always do when they lose a loved one to state violence: reclaim his character by showing that he was a loving, doting father who called his mother every day, worked hard, and made everyone laugh. They had to make him human, to inform the (white) world that his life had as much value as that of Good and Pretti. It’s tired and should be unnecessary, and to her credit, even Renee Good’s sister, Annie Ganger, felt the need to remind people that the violence that took her sister’s life “isn’t new” and that it was unfair that “the way someone looks garners more or less attention. And I’m so sorry that this is the reality.” Meanwhile, the “brave” ICE agent (whose name the LAPD initially refused to release), it turned out, had a reputation for anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, [allegations of perpetrating] child abuse, and had once showed up at a youth sporting event armed.


“The movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional.”

The point I’m trying to make here isn’t simply that Keith Porter needs to be acknowledged but rather the violence that stole him from his family not only “isn’t new,” it is routine. As a Black man who was native to Compton, California, he had an invisible target on his back. He knew what it is like to live in a police state. Premature death at the hands of armed agents of the state is merely a hazard of being Black in America. This is why the movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional, insisting that they are part of a larger matrix of state violence encompassing all law enforcement and the military. It’s not enough to “abolish ICE”; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety. With regards to Keith Porter, of course randomly shooting a gun in the air is not safe and should not be permitted, but we have to address the reasons he even owns a gun. He and so many other folks like him just don’t feel safe, and U.S. settler culture is rooted in violence as a first response and guns as the chief instrument of violence. Police simply don’t help. Abolition requires changing the culture, not just eliminating the instruments of the culture.

Assuming that war is an apt concept, what does this mean in terms of how we ought to respond? I ask you this question with sincerity. There are those who will say, “Oh, Yancy must believe in armed struggle on the streets of America.” This would be a non sequitur. There is too much of my mother’s Christian sensibilities in me to hold this position. Indeed, I try, I struggle, to manifest agape (the sense of unconditional neighborly love) toward all human beings. But I love my children as you love your daughter. Indeed, for me, that love refuses a form of hospitality that facilitates their harm. I can’t possibly stand by when the Brownshirts come hammering at the door with fascistic bloodlust in their eyes. Here I’m reminded of Claude McKay’s poem, “If We Must Die.” Toward the end he writes:

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

I appreciate your invocation of Claude McKay. As you know, that poem is almost always cited as an expression of the so-called New Negro, the spirit of defiance that suddenly erupts in the wake of World War I and the “Red Summer” of 1919. But this is a misnomer since Black communities had been practicing armed self-defense since they were dragged to these shores. Armed self-defense is the tradition; nonviolent civil disobedience is the rupture, the break with the past. The historical record is clear and unambiguous, as we’ve seen in the writings (memoirs and scholarship) of Robert and Mabel Williams, Akinyele Umoja, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Kellie Carter Jackson, Lance Hill, Jasmin Young, Nicholas Johnson, Simon Wendt, and many others. These writers have shown us, time and time again, that African Americans have a very long and surprisingly successful tradition of armed self-defense against mob violence. Armed self-defense has saved countless lives.


“It’s not enough to ‘abolish ICE’; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety.”

To be fair, militant nonviolent civil disobedience also courageously faces “the murderous, cowardly pack” and is undeniably “fighting back.” But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first impulse to keep a pistol by his bedside during the Montgomery bus boycott to protect his family against organized, state-sanctioned mob violence made perfect sense. You can’t win the racist mob or the brownshirts over with love, certainly not in the midst of war. This is why I find those commercials featuring an ICE agent who comes home to his kids and has his conscience suddenly pricked by a child’s query so frustrating, naïve, and ineffectual. If conscience mattered, the faces and screams of the people they brutalized, the lives they took, and the loved ones who had to bear witness would have convinced most of these dudes to quit their jobs long ago.

This kind of terror is not new; ICE and Border Patrol agents have been behaving like this for decades. Stephen Miller didn’t have to tell them what to do. Restraint must come before reeducation and redemption, and imposing restraint is impossible without consequences and accountability. As Dr. King said repeatedly in various speeches, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”

War is certainly an apt concept here. It is how I frame the assault on Black people in my forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. As I write in the book, “Policing is war by another name…. Whether we call it a war on crime, a war on militants, a war on drugs, law enforcement at every level has turned many Black neighborhoods into killing fields and open-air prisons, stripping vulnerable residents of equal protection, habeas corpus, freedom of movement, even protection from torture.” But as the anthropologist Orisanmi Burton put it in his book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, this is not a war we chose. He refers to sites of incarceration as “sites of counter-war,” which can be extended to virtually all Black and Black-led resistance to injustice, mob rule, criminalization, state violence, exploitation, and the very conditions that make Black people vulnerable to premature death. This counter-war holds out the possibility of freeing everyone, including those recruited to maintain systems of domination.

That said, I think the debate over whether we’re ready to go to war is a false debate because we’re already at war. We were at war before Trump came into office, before the neoliberal turn, before Jim Crow, before all of that. It begins with the kidnapping and trafficking of our African ancestors, and the violent dispossession of our Indigenous ancestors. Both processes fall under the category of genocide. John Brown was right to call American slavery “a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion.” These wars are fundamentally about turning flesh and earth into property, and whole peoples into combatants and commodities.


“Revolutionary pessimism is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed ‘anticipatory optimism’ — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail.”

We have to consider the centuries of continuous, protracted war. Once we acknowledge the reality of protracted war and counter-war, then we have to stretch our definition of “armed struggle.” In this asymmetrical war, guns are not the only weapons. Arson has been a weapon of the enslaved in their own counter-war against Christians holding them in bondage. Minneapolis is where they burned down the police station. Civil resistance has taken on so many forms that don’t fall neatly under traditional categories of “violence” or nonviolence, and have revealed the wide arsenal of “arms” people have deployed in struggle.

Again, in Making a Killing, which is as much if not more about collective resistance (counter-war) than acts of state violence (war), I write about rebellion in Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, New York, and elsewhere, and building on the work of Akinyele Umoja, who wrote We Will Shoot Back, I chart the tradition of armed self-defense in Mississippi in light of the police-perpetrated killing of Jonathan Sanders in 2015. Once we acknowledge the long war and redefine armed struggle, we’ll recognize that we’re already in it. We have to figure out what to do, how to strategize, and what it means when casualties of war are white people — which, of course, is not a new thing. It’s a rare thing and ebbs and flows, depending on the extent to which white people see this as their fight.

Your book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination was published in 2002. That was 24 years ago. For many, it is no doubt hard to dream, and I mean this both literally and figuratively. There are times when I try to fall asleep at night and I become obsessed with a singular nightmare: the creation of private militias that have state approval to throw me in jail for writing something or for refusing to embrace Trump’s fascism or our having this discussion. I see hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity. I see so many people being disappeared. I see American-style gulags. I see the complete disregard and overthrow of the Constitution where there are no checks and balances, where there is no longer a two-party system, where due process is nonexistent, and there are literally no exits out of this country. I see my neighbor turning me in because I expressed hatred toward white supremacy and shouted, “Love First!” over “America First!” In this case, perhaps all of those who care about freedom, community, their neighbors, and the importance of democracy “will find out,” as Trump said about Chicago, “why it’s called the Department of WAR.” I believe in the power of movements, but Trump is malicious and I have no doubt that he would, if given the opportunity (perhaps I should say, when given the opportunity), unleash the full might of the Department of War on us. How do we continue to dream, Robin, to have freedom dreams, when the U.S. continues to amplify the reality of dystopic nightmares?

I feel you. I also know we’ve been through worse. A “private militia” (read: mob and police) with “state approval to throw me in jail for writing something” or challenging the status quo by, say, trying to vote, or “hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity,” and “American-style gulags” (keeping in mind how many gulags were actually modeled on U.S. convict labor camps) — and now we’re talking about Meridian, Mississippi (1871), Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), New Orleans, Louisiana (1900), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), Springfield, Illinois (1908), East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), Elaine, Arkansas (1919), and, as you and I discussed at length back in 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). We have been here. But I understand that to say what’s happening now has happened before, sometimes worse, gives us little comfort.

I do want to make a case for the value of “freedom dreams” in times like these. I’m always reminding readers that what I called the Black radical imagination is not wishful thinking, not an escape from reality, not some kind of dream state conjured and nurtured independent of the day-to-day struggles on the ground. The main point of the book is that the radical visions animating social movements are forged in collective resistance and a critical, clear-eyed analysis of the social order. In fact, in the 20th-anniversary edition which came out in 2022, I underscore this point, writing, “The book does not prioritize ‘freedom dreams’ to the exclusion of ‘fascist nightmares.’ If anything, I show that freedom dreams are born of fascist nightmares, or, better yet, born against fascist nightmares.” The context in which I wrote it, the early Bush years, was decidedly an era of dystopic nightmares: a wave of police killings, culminating in the massive response to the murder of Amadou Diallo, 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, accelerating neoliberalism, and so forth. Moreover, the movements I explore imagined freedom in the darkest of times: Black Exodus out of an Egyptland of lynching, disfranchisement, new forms of slavery, and segregation; Black embrace of socialist revolution at the height of fascism, global economic crisis, and anti-communism; and Black radical feminism in a moment of heightened sexual violence, femicide, carceral expansion, and an increasingly masculinist Black freedom movement.

In other words, all of these movements were fueled not by false optimism but by a deep understanding of the death-dealing structures of gendered racial capitalism. Freedom dreaming, as it were, is not a luxury; our survival as a people depends on envisioning a radically different future for all and fighting to bring it into existence. The fight or the struggle is precisely how visions of the future are forged, clarified, revised, or discarded.

I just mentioned the power of movements. Coming back to Freedom Dreams, you argue that that there is more that is needed to fight for freedom than organized protest, marches, sit-ins, strikes, and slowdowns. For you, surrealism is also necessary. You write, “Surrealism recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality (which is like rationalization, the same word they use for improving capitalist production and limiting people’s needs).” When I read that passage again, I thought of the power of poiesis — that sense of creation or that sense of bringing something that is radically new into being. Speak to how surrealism continues to inform your understanding of liberation and perhaps even hope amid so much fear, pain, anger, and perhaps, like for me, nightmarishness.

Really great question, one I continued to ponder after writing Freedom Dreams. A critical argument I make in that chapter and elsewhere is that the Africans across the diaspora had been practicing or living surrealism long before Europeans named it. I gave examples, one being the blues. I left it undeveloped in the book, but since then have been thinking about the blues alongside Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, the brilliant geographer Clyde Woods, and French surrealist whom I don’t mention in Freedom Dreams, Pierre Naville. The blues, not just as music but epistemology, can be defined as a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity — or, in your words, so much fear, pain, anger, and nightmarishness. True, rising nationalism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, neoliberalism, and the relative weakness of contemporary mass movements offers little reassurance that a liberated future is on the horizon. But the blues, as with the Black radical imagination, resists fatalism and inevitability. It demands and narrates action.


“We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders.”

This is where I find Pierre Naville helpful. A founding member of the Paris Surrealist group and one of the first to join the Communist Party, in 1926 he published a pamphlet titled “The Revolution and Intellectuals,” which argued, among other things, that pessimism was not a reason for despair, withdrawal, melancholy, or bitterness. What he called the “richness of a genuine pessimism” (which he traced to Hegel’s philosophy and “Marx’s revolutionary method”) requires action and must take political form. Naville’s revolutionary pessimism was a critique of the optimism of Stalinist assertions about the inevitable triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union and the imminent fall of capitalism. It was also a critique of the “shallow optimism” of social democrats who believed that they could eventually vote their way into creating a socialist commonwealth. His revolutionary pessimism was not fatalistic resignation or an obsession with the “decline” of elites or nations or Western civilization. Rather, it was a call for collective revolutionary action by, and on behalf of, the oppressed classes. Revolutions are not inevitable, nor do they correspond with particular objective conditions. People just don’t have the luxury to wait for the “right conditions.” Instead, movements must interrupt historical processes leading to catastrophe, by any means necessary. It is not enough to “hope,” we must be determined.

Revolutionary pessimism, therefore, is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed “anticipatory optimism” — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail. I am hesitant to say “win” because, as I’ve written elsewhere, assessing movements only in terms of wins and losses obscures the power of movements to inform and transform us. Here is the power of poiesis, of making new worlds and new relationships — not from nothing but from love — rather than reforming or bandaging old systems. So we come full circle. It is not enough to be anti-capitalist and/or anti-prisons and police, to beat back a half-millennium of catastrophe. We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore once told an interviewer, “Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something…. Abolition is a theory of change, it’s a theory of social life. It’s about making things.”

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

George Yancy

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

 

Marx’s value theory, multidimensional imperialism and ecological breakdown: Interview with Güney Işıkara and Patrick Mokre

By Güney Işıkara, Patrick Mokre & Federico Fuentes

Published date 22 February, 2026

Güney Işıkara and Patrick Mokre are authors of Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers: Classical Political Economics, Imperialism and Ecological Breakdown. Işıkara is Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, whose research focuses on ecological breakdown and alternative modes of organising production and reproduction. Mokre is a guest researcher at the Economics of Inequality institute in the Vienna University of Business and Economics (WU), whose studies centre on the political economy of labour, inequality and capitalism.

In this interview with Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Işıkara and Mokre discuss imperialism’s multidimensional nature, how Karl Marx’s value theory helps explain its economic core and why a value-theoretical framework for studying the global economy is urgently needed.

This interview is the latest in LINKS’ ongoing series on imperialism today.

Discussions regarding imperialism often refer to Vladimir Lenin’s pamphlet on the subject. How do you define imperialism? Do you see Lenin’s concept as still valid? What, if any, elements of Lenin’s concept have since been superseded?

Imperialism shapes the global economy today like no other factor, and that is perfectly clear to most working people around the world. Outsourcing of production, volatile prices of imported goods, exchange rate-induced inflation, foreign investors pushing down wages or domestic capitalists invoking international competition to do the same, debt service on (private and sovereign) foreign debt, and so forth — for most of the global population, imperialism’s effects are felt in everyday life. That does not make its dynamics any less complicated, however.

We see imperialism as the mode of operation of international capital accumulation, rooted in the same dynamics that define capitalism: surplus value production through labour exploitation, which is then reinvested to accumulate and outgrow competitors. Imperialism is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon inherent in the concept of capital as self-expanding value.

It appears as a system of asymmetric economic, political and military power relations that are difficult to distinguish descriptively and separate analytically. It is a mistake therefore to treat these dimensions independently of each other.

From its start, the capitalist mode of production has been international. Its expansion across borders adopted and transformed pre-existing patterns of trade, colonisation and exploitation. When capitalism became the dominant mode of production — first in certain regions and eventually globally — it became clear that internationalisation was an innate feature of capital accumulation, generating specific forms of domination.

Historically, the internationalisation of capital took place in all three functional forms of capital: commodity capital, money capital and production capital. Each phase, however, gave rise to distinct empirical patterns of power relations, along with corresponding waves of imperialism theories.

Lenin’s intervention came at a crucial moment amid World War I — an unprecedented event driven by capital’s expansionist dynamics. It is worth noting that his pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (subtitled A Popular Outline) was intended as a survey of empirical evidence from advanced capitalist countries. It largely supported previous arguments by John A Hobson (in 1902) and Nikolai Bukharin (written in 1915 and published in 1917).

The emphasis on capital exports was a timely intervention as the internationalisation of productive capital was starting to appear on an unprecedented scale. Capital exports remain a central channel of economic imperialism today. Just consider cross-border ownership structures and so-called foreign direct investment in productive capital, which formed Lenin’s point of departure, or the dominance of a few financial centres over credit and debt worldwide.

We also value that Lenin grounded his explanation of the drive toward capital exports in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, rather than in problems of realisation or theories of underconsumption.

On the other hand, what was largely missing from the first wave of imperialism theories (roughly the first two-to-three decades of the 20th century) was a sustained attempt to link the study of imperialism — or the internationalisation of capital — to the law of value. Henryk Grossman and Otto Bauer were notable exceptions. Both sought to analyse international transfers of value between regions and countries. This line of inquiry then remained surprisingly dormant until it was revived by Arghiri Emmanuel in the late 1960s.

Your latest book explains how Karl Marx’s value theory can help us better understand the economics of imperialism. Can you outline why?

As we see it, imperialism is the way capitalism functions on the international stage. It is essentially what happens when capital accumulation crosses borders and encounters historically structured unequal development, patterns of domination, and asymmetric power relations. Therefore the economic core of imperialism follows the broader logic of capital accumulation and reproduction, which is precisely what value theory helps explain.

Since the early 20th century, attempts to theorise imperialism have evolved alongside imperialism’s development, or more broadly, alongside the changing patterns of internationalised accumulation.

At the start of the 20th century, Rudolf Hilferding, Bukharin and Lenin emphasised exports of productive capital, while Bauer and Grossmann examined power imbalances and transfers of value through trade.

After World War II, many peripheral countries formally decolonised but found themselves subject to new forms of dependency. Kwame Nkrumah coined the term neo-colonialism, Walter Rodney described underdevelopment as an active process driven by the imperialist centre, and, importantly, Emmanuel viewed value transfers as a regular and necessary outcome of international competition.

In the 1990s, when financial deregulation was imposed on the periphery and capital exports increasingly took the form of money capital, Marxist scholars debated financialisation and currency hierarchies.

Binding these different approaches is their common grounding in Marxist theory. Our argument is that value theory can serve as the unifying thread. In the book, we explore one specific dimension of the economics of imperialism by expanding the concept of international value transfers, since these transfers express and reinforce the inequalities structured and reproduced through capitalist competition.

Although the book focuses on the quantitative dimensions of Marx’s value theory — also known as the labour theory of value — we emphasise that this is much more than a quantitative tool. It investigates the law of value, which captures the processes that make the reproduction of capitalist society possible.

Capitalist society is fragmented into private, autonomous units making decisions under competitive pressures, with only partial information and without any mechanism of prior coordination. Marx’s value theory therefore lets us analyse a wide range of phenomena, including capitalist alienation and commodity fetishism, among others.

The labour theory of value examines how production and the social division of labour are regulated by value, particularly from a quantitative perspective. It starts with the creation of value through socially necessary labour time (direct prices), to surplus value’s redistribution in conditions of capitalist competition (prices of production reflecting a general rate of profit), and finally to market prices as indicators of day-to-day shifts in market conditions.

We construct a large dataset of direct prices, prices of production and market prices, and analyse both the regular relationships among these three sets and the systematic deviations between them.

A central thread in the economics of imperialism is the redistribution of surplus value across industries and borders, as well as the appropriation of surplus value produced by workers in one country by capitalists in another. Productive forces in the neo-colonial periphery — outside the traditional colonial and imperial centres — remain underdeveloped and capitals in the centre are powerful enough to mobilise entire states in their interests. Therefore huge redistributions of value occur.

These occur through several channels: the mobility of productive capital (including profit repatriation) and portfolio investment; the capture of value generated in productive industries in one country by non-productive sectors (finance, real estate and so on) in others; and transfers of value across industries and countries through the equalisation of profit rates, that is through the formation of international prices of production.

We examine the last mechanism in detail, focusing on cross-nation and cross-industry differences in the value composition of capital and in rates of surplus value. This line of research had largely faded from Marxist debates after the 1910s, until revived by Emmanuel in his seminal book, Unequal Exchange.

We develop a coherent value-theoretical framework for analysing international transfers of value and, for the first time, present empirical estimates covering a large number of countries over a significant time period. One of our key findings is that aggregate value transfers — representing only one mechanism of economic imperialism — were more than 70 trillion euros between 1995–2020, with gains concentrated in a small group of countries while the majority experienced losses.

This approach’s central strength lies in treating imperialism as an integral part of capitalist competition at the international level, rather than attributing global inequalities to imperfections in an otherwise smoothly functioning capitalism or relying on theoretically eclectic foundations.

In recent times Marxists have sought to incorporate ecology into their understanding of imperialism, raising concepts such as “unequal ecological exchange”. How can Marx’s ideas help us integrate ecology into the concept of imperialism?

The idea of unequal ecological exchange (also called ecologically unequal exchange) emerged from a particular critique of Marx’s value theory. The argument is that Marxist analyses of international trade focus primarily on transfers — and unequal exchanges — of labour values, which are seen as only one form of energy, while overlooking the asymmetric flows of raw materials, land and other forms of energy.

From a broader perspective, it is certainly true that global capitalism's functioning favours the imperial core in terms of the redistribution of surplus value, as well as the appropriation and use of various forms of use value. To describe such processes, Marx used the notion of a “system of robbery,” borrowing the term from German scientist Justus von Liebig, to explain how soil degradation in the countryside accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism in the cities. He also referred to colonial relations in discussing how the dynamics of capital accumulation in England exhausted Irish soil for more than a century.

In recent decades, many studies have analysed international trade through environmental indicators such as ecological footprint (the amount of ecologically productive land area per capita), land or space embodied in commodities, physical trade balances and material flows. These are important contributions because they document the material enrichment of the imperial core at the expense of workers and peasants in the periphery — a key dimension of imperialism.

It is a mistake, however, to think that such material flow patterns have self-constituted dynamics. A defining feature of capitalism is that social and environmental concerns are subordinated to capital accumulation. Social structures and use values — whether from non-capitalist production or non-human nature — are reduced to their usefulness for accumulation and often degraded or destroyed in the process.

Think of a river that offers many use values: it provides enjoyment for swimmers, an ecosystem for fish and algae, and a vital function in the water–groundwater–precipitation cycle, while also serving as a cooling source for data centres. Once its cooling function is fully exploited, the discharged water returns hot and polluted, riverbeds and currents shift, fish and plant life die off, and the water becomes unsafe for recreation. The contradiction between use and exchange value thus lies at the heart of ecological breakdown.

We cannot explain the global distribution of materials, land, energy, space and waste without a coherent theory of accumulation and its relationship to use values. This is precisely what Marx’s value theory provides through the duality of use value and exchange value — a contradiction embedded in every commodity.

The original imperialist powers built their wealth and military might on colonial conquest and pillage of pre-capitalist societies. How have the mechanisms of imperialist exploitation changed over time? Are these countries still the main imperialist powers today?

There is a striking continuity between the pre-capitalist colonial empires and the power centres of contemporary imperialism. Colonial trade and slavery helped fuel industrialisation and the genocidal expropriation of Indigenous lands that accompanied that transition.

However, pre-capitalist colonialism and contemporary imperialism operate through different economic dynamics. The most powerful country in today’s imperial core, the United States, was not a colonial empire in the classical sense but itself a colony. Conversely, once-dominant colonial empires, such as Spain and England, are now far more marginal. Historical continuities exist, but they should not be overstated: colonialism and imperialism follow distinct economic logics.

Under capitalism, capital accumulation is the driving force. Because of this process's internal contradictions, the most advanced capitals in a country eventually run up against limits shaped by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

At the same time, they are powerful enough to mobilise their state apparatuses to support their interests abroad. By investing in countries with older and less efficient capitals, lower wages, weaker regulation and generally lower levels of competition, they secure higher profit rates, at least temporarily. They also deploy economic power alongside military, diplomatic and political resources to suppress competitive threats and keep productive forces in other regions underdeveloped.

The dominant mechanisms of international capitalism have shifted over time. Before the 20th century, former colonial empires and emerging imperialist states primarily used the periphery as a source of cheap resources — often close to outright plunder — and cheap or enslaved labour.

A major shift occurred with the large-scale export of capital commodities, not simply for sale to foreign capitalists but as a means to outsource production while retaining ownership. Capital exports generated substantial profit flows from the periphery back to industries in the imperialist countries.

Immediate after World War II, profitability in the imperial centre was a less pressing problem, while formal decolonisation of colonies became central. During this period, a consolidated world market, in which the periphery depended on importing consumer and capital goods while exporting agricultural products and raw materials, grew in importance. This led to significant international transfers of value.

In the 1990s, capitalism was re-introduced in many parts of the world. The imperialist core remained the only viable trading partner, one restructured through the neoliberal backlash to eroding profitability in the 1960s and ’70s. This led to a wave of global deregulation and liberalisation, and the globalisation of financial institutions from the imperialist core exporting capital in financial form and consolidating various forms of dependency.

This is a simplified timeline, but there are two essential points. First, capital exports — in commodity, productive and money form — have always been central to imperialism. One mechanism of economic imperialism emerging does not eliminate others.

For example, value transfers arising from the existence of a world market do not disappear just because value capture linked to money capital becomes more prominent. It remains a single capitalist system, constantly evolving in pursuit of higher profits under conditions of real competition. Analysing imperialism today means examining all mechanisms of dominance, while considering possible countervailing forces.

Second, the economics of imperialism primarily describe capital-to-capital — or, more simply, industry-to-industry — relationships, rather than relations between nations treated as homogeneous entities. Different segments of capital also compete within nations, often over whose interests the state advances. Consider, for instance, tensions between manufacturing industries in the US, which have lost ground during the US-led expansion of global markets, and the tech sector, which has benefited enormously from enforcing technological property rights in formally open markets.

For this reason, we reserve analytical categories such as exploitation for the social relationship between capital and labour — that is, between capitalists and workers — rather than relations between countries. The study of imperialism, while centred on the international dimensions of capital accumulation, cannot be reduced to relations between nations abstracted from class conflict.

Your research shows China is one of the world’s biggest winners in terms of value transfers. Yet China’s per capita GDP is far behind the wealthiest countries. How should we categorise China’s global status? What are the economic foundations and specific features that help explain China’s position? And how should we understand the growing US-China conflict, particularly as their economies are more integrated than ever?

Providing some context for our results is helpful here. Our dataset covers the period 1995–2020, and at the start of this period China occupied a subdominant position. In the 1990s, China accounted for a much smaller share of global output than today, with a low value composition of capital and a high rate of surplus value. Through both channels, it transferred value to the imperialist core.

In the early 2000s, China’s capital composition began to converge toward the global average, and it became a recipient of value transfers through that mechanism. In the early 2010s, a similar shift took place with the rate of surplus value. China’s transition from net loser to net recipient coincides with the Global Financial Crisis, roughly in 2010, and it has maintained this advantageous position since.

During the same period, our results show a relative setback for the US, particularly in terms of value composition. To us, this aligns with broader developments: China’s relative stability, its sustained capitalisation and its rise to global leadership in several key industries contrasted with a turbulent decade in the US economy, economically and politically.

We should stress, however, that our figures only refer to transfers of value resulting from the formation of international prices of production. They do not capture other major mechanisms of economic imperialism, such as the role of non-production industries in appropriating value created abroad, capital exports, advantages linked to currency hierarchies and similar dynamics.

It is reasonable to assume that the US, along with other core imperialist countries, still enjoy significant advantages in these areas, which are not analysed in this book. We plan to extend our research using a coherent value-theoretical framework to examine these extra dimensions and provide a more comprehensive empirical picture.

And then, beyond economics, there is also political and military power. As the US faces relative economic decline — or, more precisely, as it is more directly challenged by China economically — it has mobilised its political and military capacities more frequently and assertively. In strictly military terms, the US still holds clear and substantial supremacy.

For that reason, we do not believe that our findings are enough to conclude that China is already an imperialist power or that it is fully on par with the US as an imperialist rival. What we show is that China has shifted its position in one central dimension of imperialism. That shift is significant and substantial, but not, on its own, enough to determine China’s overall position within the imperialist world system.

Conversely, Russia, which many label as imperialist due to its use of military power abroad, remains a net loser in terms of value transfer. Where do you see Russia fitting into the imperialist North/Global South divide?

With the same caveats mentioned earlier — that the analysis in the book is partial and provisional — our findings indicate that Russia is not a net recipient of international value transfers. That does not mean, however, that it is necessarily a net loser in all other dimensions of economic imperialism.

Nor does it imply that Russia holds a subordinate military position, whether regionally or globally. Our analysis needs to be deepened and extended to extra mechanisms through which value is captured and appropriated on a global scale. We intend to pursue this.

We see the world economy, as well as global political and military power structures, as still dominated by the conventional imperialist countries — above all the US and its G7 allies. At the same time, our analysis of global capitalism is grounded in the concept of real competition. At both micro and macro levels, relations of domination are continuously contested, largely due to capitalism’s internal contradictions. Challenging powers may succeed or fail, and these processes often unfold over long historical periods.

Imperialism is therefore not only a relationship of domination between imperialist and neo-colonial countries. It also involves rivalries within the dominant bloc, as well as competition among neo-colonial countries striving to improve their relative positions.

Over time, a country’s economic and military capacities may erode to such an extent that maintaining its political standing within the imperial bloc becomes its main objective. Conversely, a country may strengthen economically — China is an obvious example — and begin challenging established hierarchies primarily through economic channels, while remaining militarily subordinate and excluded from the core political alliances upholding the existing order.

What do these examples — along with those of countries such as Australia, Taiwan and South Korea, which are generally viewed as part of the imperialist camp yet are net losers in terms of value transfers — tell us about the reliability of focusing on just one or a few economic indicators (value transfers, labour productivity, GDP per capita, etc) to determine a country’s status in the world today? Also, have you encountered any issues in using available economic data to establish results that are meaningful for Marxist economics/value theory?

This question goes straight to the heart of how we understand imperialism — and, more broadly, value theory itself. We are always dealing with counteracting forces and internal contradictions, and these force us to look beyond any single indicator.

Take Taiwan. Taiwanese capital, as a whole, appears as a net giver in terms of value transfers. At the same time, its semiconductor industry is not only internationally competitive but in many respects technologically dominant. However, this strength is concentrated largely in one sector, and that sector remains highly dependent on demand from the tech industries of China and the US.

Value transfers linked to the value composition of capital — where Taiwanese semiconductor producers are clearly in a recipient position — may be offset by value losses in other industries. This reflects Taiwan’s subdominant position within the broader alliance of imperialist countries.

South Korea is somewhat different. It has a relatively diversified production structure, with most major industries domestically owned. Like Germany, South Korea appears as a net giver of international value transfers, yet it also runs a strong trade surplus. In other words, the disadvantages it faces in one mechanism of economic imperialism may be counterbalanced — or even outweighed — by advantages in another.

In the book, we did not systematically analyse ownership structures or trade balances; comparing these different channels remains a future task. But these examples illustrate the broader point: relying on one variable is not enough to determine a country’s position within global capitalism.

Imperialism is shaped by multiple, interacting mechanisms. That is precisely why we believe developing a coherent and consistent value-theoretical framework for studying the global economy is not only useful, but urgently needed.

Considering all of this, what should 21st century anti-imperialist internationalism look like?

Quite frankly, we wrote a book in which one chapter examines two of the many core economic channels of imperialism. When it comes to anti-imperialist internationalism, much more than academic research is needed; solidarity and resistance must also take practical forms.

That said, we believe our work can offer insight into potential choke points and broader structural dynamics — especially for those who are critical of the concentration of power in a small group of imperialist countries or concerned about the growing risk of destructive imperialist wars.

First, we find no evidence supporting the claim, common in the 1970s, that imperialism primarily relies on wage differentials that materially privilege workers in imperialist countries. Depending on one’s position in the debate, this may seem trivial or counterintuitive. But it also weakens the claim — associated with thinkers such as Emmanuel — that international solidarity between workers in neo-colonial and imperialist countries is structurally unviable. On the contrary, as the social contract in the imperial core — relative stability in exchange for relative comfort — gives way to declining living standards, precarious employment, offshoring and increased migration driven by war and deprivation, solidarity across borders and passports becomes more necessary.

Second, the international value transfers we analyse are largely the outcome of the very existence of a world market. In its most basic form, capitalism generates uneven development and widening inequalities. This casts doubt on world market-oriented reforms or capitalist-state-sponsored strategies to mitigate such inequalities. Reforming capitalism at an international scale to tame its social and environmental ills is the greatest illusion right now, where its contradictions are so sharpened that international conventions and laws are increasingly null and void.

Third, it is evident that the imperialist core is ramping up military expenditures, driven both by internal contradictions and by intensifying competition over the strategic inputs required for capital accumulation — rare earths, lithium, copper, cobalt, and similar resources. The drive to directly subordinate the periphery’s resources to the needs of the imperial centre is intensifying.

From the standpoint of these countries, the struggle for national liberation and sovereignty remains as relevant as ever. At the same time, unconditional and practical solidarity from the working classes and socialists within imperialist countries remains indispensable.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Interview

The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition Recognized Fascism Didn’t Begin in Europe

Black anti-fascists have long warned about creeping fascism, from slavery to mass incarceration to ICE terror.

By George Yancy ,

Truthout

February 21, 2026

Prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility give the Black Power salute on September 10, 1971. “I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and prison abolitionists,” says scholar Jeanelle K. Hope. “The Attica prison uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.”

Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images

Back in 2016, I was asked what I thought about Donald Trump. Even back then, I saw him as an aspiring fascist, and I responded:

Simply put. He is a conduit through which white America expresses its most vile desire for white purity. An apocalyptically dangerous white man who sees himself as the center of the world. That kind of hubris bespeaks realities of genocide.

Trump 2.0 has only confirmed my fears, my dread, and my anger. Make no mistake about it: This administration is unapologetically and shamelessly hellbent on establishing a violent white fascistic state. I know that some are surprised, but the truth of the matter is that the horrible reality of anti-Black fascism is not a new formation. The soul of this country was founded upon white power, white greed, and white violence. So, I am not surprised by the likes of Trump; he is a product of a vicious poison, a historical legacy, that predates his abominable presidency. But this isn’t mere speculation or exaggeration. Our bodies and psyches are a record of this history: chains, enslavement, dehumanization, scarred backs, raped bodies, castrated bodies, broken necks, broken family ties, denied rights, denied citizenship, mass incarceration, and slow death. Indeed, there are those Black voices who not only recorded this history, but who understood its fascistic logics. For example, Black poet and activist Langston Hughes wrote:

Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.

And it was Black sociologist and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois who wrote, “We have conquered Germany … but not their ideas. We still believe in white supremacy, keeping Negroes in their place.”

Amid Trump’s War on Antifa, Activists Face Arrest for Zines and Group Chats
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By Brit “Red” Schulte , Truthout January 10, 2026

Thinking about the reality of anti-Black fascism led me to the indispensable work of Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. When it comes to documenting anti-Black fascism, they trace a longer arc with respect to the rise of fascism; they show just how European fascists drew from early U.S. laws for their own specific fascist formations, and how the U.S. functioned as the very hub of fascist discourse and practice. Given this rich history and its importance for how to strategize moving forward, I conducted this exclusive interview with Jeanelle K. Hope, who is an independent scholar and a lecturer at the University of California-Washington Center.

George Yancy: It is important to historically situate the phenomenon of fascism, especially within our contemporary context where the Constitution is being trampled upon, and what one might call the paramilitary deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Your book, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, which you co-authored with Bill V. Mullen, powerfully challenges the narrative that fascism is a phenomenon that is exclusive to 20th-century Europe. In this regard, your book constitutes a necessary counter-narrative that highlights the gratuitous violent history that Black people in the U.S. have faced since their enslavement. This counter-narrative is what you term the Black anti-fascist tradition. In brief, what are some of the features that define the Black anti-fascist tradition?

Jeanelle K. Hope: The Black anti-fascist tradition recognizes that there has been a long arc of fascism throughout history, and that anti-Blackness has long undergirded fascist policies and formations, thus, disrupting prevailing historical narratives and theorizing on fascism. We argue that the earliest roots (or pillars) of fascism — authoritarian rule, genocide and ethnic cleansing, militarism, racial capitalism, dual application of the law — can be traced to the colonization of Africa and chattel slavery across the Americas. One of the most salient and defining features of anti-Black fascism is genocide. We chart out the systematic genocide of Black people from the brutality of enslavement, post-emancipation lynchings, to state-sanctioned violence and police brutality. Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors and Red Record, W.E.B. Du Bois’s lynching reports in The Crisis, William Patterson’s petition to the United Nations entitled, “We Charge Genocide,” and Arlene Eisen’s 2012 report “Operation Ghetto Storm” all meticulously document the impact of lynchings and the immiseration of Black life. And with such damming evidence in hand, they argued that such acts constitute genocide. Indeed, “We Charge Genocide” emerges as a cross-generation rallying cry among Black anti-fascists like Patterson, Stokely Carmichael, and the Chicago-based youth group aptly named “We Charge Genocide.”

Beyond presenting this counter-narrative, so much of our book also names how Black people have been on the front lines of anti-fascist struggles in Europe (the Spanish Civil War), Ethiopia (the Italian invasion of Ethiopia), and across the United States. Moreover, the Black anti-fascist tradition underscores that fascism attacks on multiple fronts (i.e., art and cultural production, education, immigration, law and policy, health care, housing, etc.) and subsequently, requires a multifaceted resistance. Black anti-fascists have incorporated various organizing strategies, tactics, and actions including legal challenges, mutual aid, anarchy, autonomy, self-defense, boycotts, solidarity, and abolition.

What I think is an important takeaway from the Black anti-fascist tradition is knowing that Black people have long warned about what I describe as fascism’s incessant creep. Fascism is not born overnight. It is relentless and creeps through society, systems, laws, and more over time. Black anti-fascists have played the long game, trying to check the creep of fascism at every turn, knowing that if left unchecked, humanity will enter some truly dark days.

In your book, you write, “By the time the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini began to theorize racial purity and Aryan identity politics, discussing race in this quasi-biological sense in the U.S. was old news.” This is such an important observation as it places anti-Black racism at the very core of the foundation of this nation. Talk about the centrality of “racial purity” and how that myth shaped the U.S., and how it continues to do so. And here I’m thinking about Trump’s disgusting use of the expression “shithole countries” and his encouragement of immigrants from Norway.

Recognizing that race/racism/racial hierarchy are at the very foundation of colonial rule, it is of no surprise that race is also at the crux of fascism. From the onset, the history of the United States is marked by colonialism, and race almost immediately emerges as a system of domination to subordinate Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans brought to the country. This racial hierarchy had/has significant economic and social implications. With Black, Brown, and Indigenous people viewed as subordinate, the belief of white supremacy and white domination in the western hemisphere was fomented. Up until the early 20th century (and some would even argue still today), great lengths (i.e. anti-miscegenation laws, racial integrity laws, racial purity tests, etc.) were undertaken to ensure a rigid racial hierarchy. The mere existence of interracial relationships and mixed-race people has long served as a threat to this system, blurring the racial binary, and forcing society and governments to have deeper questions about “who is white,” and thus, gets to benefit from this system of domination.

Moreover, throughout U.S. history, this “gatekeeping” or protectionism of the white race shows up countless times from anti-immigration laws (i.e., the Chinese Exclusion Act), Jim Crow laws, the eugenics movement, and recent discourse around the “Great Replacement” theory. These efforts have largely (and unsuccessfully) sought to stymie influxes of non-white immigration, non-white births, and interracial relationships. It is also important to name that the constant pursuit of white racial purity is fundamentally tied to patriarchy, natalism and the regulation of women’s bodies, hence the recent rollbacks on abortion access and reproductive health care.

I was aware of Adolf Hitler’s admiration for the U.S.’s racial segregationist practices and its eugenics movement, but your argument delineates in detail that European fascism “had its roots in American Anti-Black Fascism.” This is a significant charge against the U.S.’s view of itself as “innocent,” and as a “shining city on a hill.” Indeed, it is this understanding of the U.S. that is necessary as we currently confront fascism in this country. You write, “Seldom have historians drawn connections between the Nuremberg Laws, Italian Racial Laws, and Jim Crow Laws of the US.” What is it about certain historians that they have failed or refused to make such a significant connection? I would even say such a significant indictment.

Naming that U.S. racial policies effectively served a blueprint for the various legal systems of European fascism would disrupt a decades-long historical narrative surrounding WWI and WWII. The story of the “Axis vs. the Allies,” and the United States’ role in defeating fascism has long been the prevailing historical narrative taken up by historians. I think there is at times a failure among historians to step back, read across archives, and to stitch multiple historical events together. We also must be honest that there has been a concerted effort among both politicians and historians to preserve a liberal or redeeming narrative surrounding the United States’ role in WWII. For example, it took decades for mainstream American history to finally recognize that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war was heinous. Yet some would still draw the line at comparing those “internment camps” to Nazi concentration camps. But it is that type of comparison that is direly needed to be able to understand the impact and evolution of fascism across time and space. We must also connect the current ICE detention centers to this broader history as well.

Finally, I think one of the biggest issues among historians, and even many leftist activists, is the aversion to name any formation of fascism outside of interwar Europe as fascism. For far too long, many have believed that Hitler and Mussolini’s fascist rise was like capturing lightning in a bottle, when fascism has long existed beyond the confines of early 20th-century European history. From a deeply human standpoint I understand why one would want to believe that the atrocities of the Holocaust and Nazism could not be replicated. Yet, Black anti-fascists have long rang the proverbial alarm about the incessant creeping nature of fascism and its onslaught on Black life. Furthermore, to ignore or discount the claims of Black people like Robert F. Williams, Harry Haywood, George Jackson — among a host of others that have named fascism as the greatest threat to Black people (and all people) just because they don’t neatly fit within longstanding scholarly traditions on historical fascism — to me, is ahistorical.

I agree! Talk about how contemporary forms of abolitionist discourse and activism are linked to the Black anti-fascist tradition. I think that such a link is so important as it communicates the historical arc of Black people who continue to refuse fascism.

I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and prison abolitionists starting with George Jackson, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Kathleen Cleaver, and later in the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Dylan Rodriguez, among others. Many of the Black political prisoners of the late 1960s and early 1970s were among the most vocal in naming that America was engaging in fascism, arguing that prisons and the rise of mass incarceration amounted to the latest evolution of fascism’s incessant creep on society. They recognized that prisons helped facilitate systematic genocide and was buttressed by a criminal justice and legal system that openly practiced a dual application of the law, whereby Black people were subjected to different interpretations of the law and harsher sentences, among other injustices. I think about Ericka Huggins’s letters from Niantic prison where she describes their poor conditions, the inhumane nature of solitary confinement, and the unjust way many Black Panther Party members, and other radicals of the era, were largely swept into prisons on trumped-up charges. I even think of those early pages of Assata Shakur’s autobiography (Assata: An Autobiography) where she describes the guards of the prison in which she was incarcerated giving Nazi salutes to each other. The Attica prison uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.

Prison abolitionists have long connected American prisons to the long arc of fascism, arguing that they are so deeply entrenched in fascism that they are beyond reform, concluding that abolition is the only solution. These arguments, of course, are most fervently explored in Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? and the work of Critical Resistance. It is from Davis and Critical Resistance’s work that more contemporary abolitionists descend. Thus, it is of no surprise that during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, calls to abolish the police emerged, and with the current wave of mass deportations and practice of “crimmigration,” there are calls to abolish ICE. The Black anti-fascist tradition recognizes that the incarceration of Black people has long been tied to the fascist pillar of genocide, thus, any reproduction of incarceration — be it ICE detention centers or Japanese internment camps — will always be part of a broader fascist project. The harrowing reports of ICE detention center conditions and deaths is the latest harbinger of fascism’s incessant creep.

Given the specificity of how Black people in the U.S. have been brutalized and dehumanized in terms of anti-Black fascist logics, talk about what strategies have emerged out of Black struggles for countering and resisting (I want to say overthrowing) U.S. fascism. On this topic, I often feel a great deal of pessimism. Yet I agree with Robin D. G. Kelly where he said to me, “There is no guarantee that we will win — whatever that means — but I guarantee that if we don’t fight, we lose.”

To feel pessimistic under the boot of fascism is only natural, and a feeling that is important to sit with. To draw upon the words of Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, I think we also must work through that pessimism and “let this [moment] radicalize you.” Earlier in the interview, I highlighted some of the major organizing tactics, strategies, and actions that animate the Black anti-fascist tradition, so I’ll use this space to stress some more practical forms of resistance for this moment. First and foremost, we all must begin the resistance to fascism through organizing and studying.

Remember, fascism attacks on all fronts, so we must develop a strategy that recognizes this and can be adapted in various spaces. Fascist policies are dismantling public education before our eyes. Parents and teachers must organize at the school district level to resist book bans and anti-ethnic studies bills. And even more so, parents must see “school choice” and “school vouchers” for what they are — the privatization of public schools. This is anti-democratic.

Fascism will quite literally starve its constituents. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of mutual aid in a moment where unemployment is increasing, particularly amongst Black women, and the federal government has slashed the budgets of many social safety-net programs, like SNAP. As fascism seeks to further divide society, we must remember to take care of those in our communities.

While there have been several boycotts and protests over the last 13 months, I do think there is much we can learn from European citizens that have mounted national strikes in response to government austerity. Overall, there is much that can be done to organize workers, as fascism’s grip on capitalism will have disproportionate impacts on the worker — as we are currently witnessing.

And most importantly, one of the most significant efforts we can do to resist fascism is to build solidarity. Solidarity is crucial to resisting fascism as it spurs organizations and mass movements. Solidarity is built through relationships, shared struggle, and deep communication with one another. While this work may seem ancillary, it will prove to be our most challenging, as fascism (and predatory social media algorithms) has fractured so many communities. Fascism thrives on division (racial, economic, national, political, gender, age, etc.), so one of the most important ways to resist it is to close those divides through respect and mutual cooperation.

CRT/DEI

Interview

A New Era of Scholarship Is Shining a Light on the Black Philosophical Tradition

Without this history, students may see Black thinkers as footnotes rather than world-historical contributors.

By George Yancy ,

Truthout

February 18, 2026

From left to right: Philosophers Hubert Harrison, Thomas N. Baker, 

and C. L. R. James.

Given the field of philosophy’s paucity of Black or African American philosophers, it is still something of an oxymoron to be a Black or African American philosopher. It is still possible to get second looks when saying, “Oh, I’m a philosopher.” Being a Black or African American philosopher doesn’t compute within a culture, and within academic settings, where images and discussions of Socrates and Plato or René Descartes and Jean-Paul Sartre dominate what philosophy looks and sounds like. In short, white folk continue to comprise the majority in the field: 81 percent. While most of my philosophical work has focused on the meaning of racial embodiment, especially anti-Blackness, and the structure of whiteness, I had the fortune to write and publish the first (or certainly one of the first) essays on African American philosophers Thomas N. Baker and Joyce M. Cook.

Baker was the first Black man to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy, awarded from Yale in 1903. And it was Cook, a dear friend of mine, who was the first Black woman to receive her Ph.D. in philosophy, also from Yale, in 1965. There is serious work that still needs to be done toward the construction of African American philosophy and primary research within the field. The work is out there — but it requires far more, as it were, archeological study. Many celebrate the history of Black Studies and the canonical figures within it, but have little sense of the existence and powerful work of African American philosophers — which is not to say that these areas are mutually exclusive.

It is for this reason that I decided to conduct this exclusive interview with philosopher Stephen C. Ferguson, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at North Carolina State University and author of the recent book, The Paralysis of Analysis in African American Studies: Corporate Capitalism and Black Popular Culture. Ferguson is one of the leading philosophers (along with John H. McClendon) whose scholarship has been invaluable in researching, locating, and critically interpreting the history and contemporary relevance of African American philosophy.

George Yancy: When I was an undergraduate studying philosophy in the early 1980s at the University of Pittsburgh, I thought that I was the only Black philosopher in the world. This was partly a function of the fact that I was typically the only Black student sitting in my philosophy classes. I had no idea that there was something called “African American philosophy.” Let’s begin there. What is African American philosophy?

Stephen C. Ferguson: A useful place to begin is with a minimal but clarifying definition. African American philosophy refers, first, to a body of texts written by African American thinkers who themselves understood their work as philosophical. This challenges a long-standing presumption within professional philosophy — that philosophy is defined exclusively by disciplinary recognition rather than by intellectual practice.

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Frederick Douglass’s Words Ring True: “Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand”
Let’s draw on the defiant wisdom of Frederick Douglass as Trump carries out a blitzkrieg against democracy in the US. By George Yancy , Truthout February 15, 2025

Here the work of Black philosopher and theologian William R. Jones is indispensable. In his seminal essay, “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy: Some Preliminary Considerations,” Jones argued that skepticism toward African American philosophy often rests on a mistaken assumption: that race must function as its essential organizing principle. Subsequently, Jones insisted that African American philosophy is not grounded in biology or some sort of “racial essence.” As he put it, “Black experience, history, and culture are the controlling categories of a Black philosophy — not chromosomes.” In this formulation, “Black” denotes an ethno-cultural formation shaped by shared historical conditions.

This does not mean that questions of race are irrelevant. The philosophy of race is an important subfield within African American philosophy. The mistake lies in assuming that it exhausts the field.

Jones therefore urged that philosophy itself be understood more broadly than narrow professional definitions allow. He proposed attending to factors such as author, audience, historical location, and antagonist. From this standpoint, African American philosophy recognizes the philosopher as situated within a specific ethno-cultural community, often addressing that community as a primary audience. Their philosophical point of departure is a historically specific experience requiring conceptual articulation, frequently from an antagonistic position that challenges academic racism in terms of concepts, curricula, and institutions.

Underlying this account is a distinction between race and ethnicity — or more precisely, between race as a classificatory system imposed through domination and ethnicity or nationality as a historically formed collective shaped by shared institutions and struggle. In the U.S. context, African Americans constitute such a distinctive ethno-national formation — forged through slavery, segregation, labor exploitation, and political resistance within a multinational state.

Following Jones, I also draw an analytic distinction between the history of African American philosophers and the philosophy of the Black experience. The former includes all African American philosophers regardless of topic or method. The latter refers to philosophical projects explicitly devoted to analyzing the meaning and consequences of Black life under determinate social conditions. As the number of African American philosophers grows, so too does the range of philosophical problems addressed — many extending well beyond race as a topic.

As an undergraduate, I knew that Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, and others were activists, but no one told me that they were philosophers or that what they had to say was of philosophical significance. The only person who shared this with me was my mentor James G. Spady. Speak to how important it is that this history be told.

I had a similar experience as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Philosophy appeared almost entirely detached from Black intellectual life. That changed when I met John H. McClendon III. From that point forward, McClendon and I — very much in the spirit of Marx and Engels — worked collectively to recover and reconstruct the African American philosophical tradition.

One of the most important outcomes of our collaboration is African American Philosophers and Philosophy: An Introduction to the History, Concepts, and Contemporary Issues. The work was the result of years of philosophical reading and archival research. What distinguished that book was not simply that it introduced African American philosophers, but that it introduced philosophy itself through the African American philosophical tradition. Before this, African American thinkers were often treated as supplementary figures or “special” topics. Or we might find, in the case of African American philosopher Charles Leander Hill, someone who writes a history of modern Western philosophy. With A Short History of Modern Philosophy from the Renaissance to Hegel, published in 1951, Hill became the first African American philosopher to publish a book on the history of modern philosophy. No one had seriously asked how to introduce philosophy — its core problems and methods — through African American thought. That intervention remains foundational.

This matters because it challenges the assumption that figures such as Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, or Angela Davis were merely activists. What our work demonstrates is that Black thinkers have produced sustained philosophical reflection on what are often called the “big questions”: metaphilosophy, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, and social philosophy. Even when these questions were not framed explicitly in racial terms, the Black experience formed the historical context of their inquiry.

“Examining Ethics” podcaster Christiane Wisehart once described John and me as “philosophical archaeologists,” and that description is apt. Our work represents a first step in the discovery, recovery, and reconstruction of an African American philosophical canon. We do not claim to have completed that task. The hope is that future generations will build upon this foundation, extending the canon we helped recover.


“Historically, Black philosophical traditions emerged less from philosophy departments than from Black intellectual culture — churches, newspapers, political movements, labor struggles, and independent study.”

African American philosophy is best understood as a species of Black intellectual thought. Historically, Black philosophical traditions emerged less from philosophy departments than from Black intellectual culture — churches, newspapers, political movements, labor struggles, and independent study. This does not sever African American philosophy from European or Anglo-American traditions; it gives it a determinate identity shaped by distinct historical conditions. Without this history, students are left believing Black thinkers are philosophical footnotes rather than world-historical contributors.

In your article, “Marxism, Philosophy, and the Africana World,” you argue that the professionalization of philosophy is rooted in institutional racism. Even as a graduate student in philosophy, at Yale and Duquesne University, I was confronted by a sea of white faces. This continues to be true now that I’m a professional philosopher. Say more about how the professionalization of philosophy is rooted in institutional racism. This issue is especially important as we now face executive and legislative policies designed to erase Black knowledge production. Think here of the March 27, 2025, executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which is aimed at censoring the full truth about the struggle of Black people in the U.S. This executive order, it seems to me, is another manifestation of racism.

To address this adequately, we must begin from a dialectical materialist standpoint and situate professional philosophy within the historical development of the modern university. Specialization and professionalization were not neutral intellectual advances; they were foundational to the university’s role within capitalist society. The specialization of knowledge led to the emergence of academic disciplines; authority shifted from broad intellectual engagement to credentialed expertise. This process established boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate inquiry.

Certain ideas and figures become hegemonic — what Marx famously described as the ruling ideas of the ruling class — while others are disqualified as philosophy and displaced from the academic marketplace. Marxism, for example, is routinely declared a historic failure or an intellectual dinosaur, even as every waking hour of social life under capitalism is organized around the urgent task of making capitalism function.

The exclusion of African American thinkers from academic institutions must be understood through class location and the organization of labor in the United States. From capitalist slavery to sharecropping, and later industrial wage labor and mass unemployment, African Americans were denied the material conditions — time, security, and institutional continuity — necessary for a stable philosophical intelligentsia. Religious institutions therefore functioned as alternative sites of education and abstraction, much as they did for other oppressed groups within the U.S. multinational state.


“The exclusion of African American thinkers from academic institutions must be understood through class location and the organization of labor in the United States.”

The autodidact materialist philosopher Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” exemplifies this contradiction. He produced systematic philosophical lectures such as “World Problems of Race” and works such as When Africa Awakes, yet was denied recognition precisely because his philosophy was embedded in Black working-class political culture rather than professional philosophy.

Dialectical analysis requires us to go further. Even when partial inclusion occurred, new constraints emerged. There remain “ruling ideas” that restrict what African American philosophy is permitted to be — shaping not only who is recognized as a philosopher, but which questions can be asked without professional penalty.

If we examine African American political philosophy across the long Cold War — from the 1950s to the present — a striking pattern emerges. Many African American philosophers aligned themselves with variants of social contract theory — a framework historically used to legitimate bourgeois democracy. From William Fontaine to Bernard Boxill to Charles Mills, one finds a persistent commitment to anti-communist liberalism — often “radicalized,” but liberalism nonetheless. Structural critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and class power are often displaced in favor of moral critique or legal reform. This has been very evident during the Reign of Emperor Trump.

The irony is profound. African American philosophers are often presented as ruthless critics of racism and white supremacy, yet the dominant theoretical orientation has largely avoided questions about the compatibility of capitalism with Black liberation, or the material limits of liberal (bourgeois) democracy.

August Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards’s work The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution is instructive. It offers a real-time comparison of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass during the struggle to abolish slavery. Marx’s and Engels’s writings on the U.S. Civil War reveal abolition not simply as a moral triumph, but as a world-historical rupture between competing social systems: capitalist slavery and industrial capitalism.

By placing Douglass’s liberalism alongside Marx’s scientific socialism, Nimtz and Edwards show that while liberalism was powerful in mobilizing moral outrage, Marxism offered a deeper structural explanation of why capitalist slavery had to be abolished. It was not the fulfillment of liberal democracy, but a contradictory breakthrough that generated new forms of labor exploitation.

The point is not to denigrate Douglass, but to clarify (via philosophical interpretation) the theoretical stakes. Liberalism and Marxism offer fundamentally different diagnoses of power and social change. To remain within liberalism is to risk mistaking reform for revolution.

You’re a Marxist-Leninist philosopher and an African American philosopher. Talk about the complexity of your identity. What does Marxist-Leninist philosophy have to teach African American philosophy and vice versa?

As a good dialectician, I have to point out that the question presumes a distinction that I do not accept. It assumes that Marxist-Leninist philosophy and African American philosophy are identities to be reconciled. My own formation suggests a different starting point.

I grew up in a Black working-class community in the Midwest, raised by parents whose political sensibilities were shaped by the Black Power movement. That environment formed my social consciousness long before I had a philosophical vocabulary. As a young ravenous reader, I consumed whatever was available — Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Dickens’s Hard Times and Great Expectations, Langston Hughes, Luke Cage comics, popular history, and political biography — until encountering The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which became a moment of nationalist awakening. That awakening unfolded against the backdrop of deindustrialization, urban decay, and the hollowing out of working-class life in the 1980s and 1990s. The racial character of that devastation was obvious, but so too was its class content. So, my philosophical journey became understanding the class character of racism and national oppression, its roots in world capitalism. This required me to read Marx’s politico-economic works, particularly Das Kapital; Vladimir Lenin’s text, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism; and Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. I should add I read C. L. R. James’s masterpiece Black Jacobins in high school.

There is no neat progression “from race to class,” no linear movement from identity to politics. My racial and class consciousness emerged together, forged by the same historical conditions. I became who I was because I am a product of my time. This is precisely the point Marx makes when he reminds us that philosophers do not emerge fully formed from abstract reflection, but from material life itself:


Philosophers do not spring up like mushrooms out of the ground; they are products of their time, of their nation, whose most subtle, valuable and invisible juices flow in the ideas of philosophy. The same spirit that constructs railways with the hands of workers, constructs philosophical systems in the brains of philosophers. Philosophy does not exist outside the world, any more than the brain exists outside man…

My Marxist-Leninist orientation, then, was not an identity choice layered onto an already-formed Blackness. Blackness shaped my motivation; dialectical and historical materialism shaped my method of investigation. That distinction has guided my work ever since.

As I was coming of age philosophically, I intensively read Black philosophers debating whether philosophy could be meaningfully adjoined to Blackness. Against William Banner’s insistence that philosophy must transcend Blackness, Roy D. Morrison (among others) posed a deeper challenge: whether Enlightenment reason itself could be reconstituted from the standpoint of Black historical experience — a project that reads as a prolegomenon to any future Black Enlightenment. Those debates raised a fundamental question: Is Blackness a philosophical perspective, or is it an object of philosophical investigation?

Here Black Studies becomes decisive. Its relationship to the philosophy of the Black experience is analogous to that between physics and the philosophy of physics. Black Studies created the intellectual space in which Blackness could be studied systematically as a material and historical phenomenon rather than treated as a deviation from an assumed universal norm. Philosophy is a critical tool among others for conceptual clarification, critique, and synthesis. It is therefore no accident that early work in the philosophy of the Black experience appeared first in Black Studies venues rather than in philosophy journals, which were far slower to recognize Black life as a legitimate object of philosophical inquiry.

It was through my engagement with Black Studies that I came to understand the limits of bourgeois democracy. And yet, professional philosophy treats bourgeois democracy as the natural — and often the only — horizon of political legitimacy. Among many African American philosophers, this assumption largely goes unchallenged. Questions about justice, rights, and citizenship are routinely framed within liberal constitutionalism, while alternative democratic traditions and historical experiences are left unexplored. Where, for example, are the sustained philosophical engagements with democracy in Cuba, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, or the Soviet Union? What might these experiences teach us about popular sovereignty, collective decision-making, and mass participation beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy?

This silence reflects the long Cold War repression of socialist political thought. It is therefore telling that figures such as Marxist philosopher C. L. R. James remain marginal within contemporary philosophy curricula. James’s Every Cook Can Govern, a profound meditation on democracy from ancient Greece to modern socialism, should be central to any serious discussion of democratic theory.

As McClendon put it succinctly, Blackness provides the motivation for doing philosophy, not the philosophical orientation. I take that formulation seriously. Marxism-Leninism offers African American philosophy the analytic tools to examine capitalism, imperialism, and the state as material systems shaping Black life. The relationship, then, is not one of identity complexity or reconciliation, but of theoretical necessity.

As African American philosophers, we must do more to get African American students to pursue the field professionally. What strategy do you suggest?

Any serious strategy must begin with an honest reckoning with the history of the American Philosophical Association (APA) and its attendant academic racism.

This was already clear in 1974, when Jones issued concrete recommendations to the APA: placement services, rosters of Black philosophers, surveys of philosophy at Black institutions, graduate fellowships, colloquia on Black philosophy, curriculum development, and the upgrading of philosophy at Black colleges. Since that time, the philosophical landscape has not moved beyond the horizon Jones set. Incremental progress has occurred, yet the overall number of African American philosophers has remained low.

We can no longer wait for professional philosophy to magically deliver Black students into the discipline. We must build our own institutional infrastructure — connected to the academy but not dependent on its permission, promises, or resources.


“Our struggle is an intergenerational relay race: We inherit unfinished questions and are accountable for carrying them forward. No one is coming to do this work for us. The future belongs to those who build.”

Changes in professional philosophy will come through institution-building and long-term strategy, not spontaneity. We must create layered spaces of intellectual formation — archival recovery, collective study, political education, and intergenerational mentorship — inside and outside the academy. Only through institution-building will we sustain a Black philosophical community that revisits core problems at increasing levels of rigor over time.

Forward ever, backward never!

In a moment when Black Studies and ethnic studies face sustained political attack, building independent yet affiliated philosophical infrastructure is not separatism; it is institutional realism.

Our strategy cannot rest on persuasion alone; persuasion presumes institutions are willing to act. History suggests otherwise. What is required is construction. Our struggle is an intergenerational relay race: We inherit unfinished questions and are accountable for carrying them forward. No one is coming to do this work for us. The future belongs to those who build.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

George Yancy

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

Clementine Barnabet: The Black woman blamed for serial murders in the Jim Crow South

A grainy photograph of Clementine Barnabet.

A 1912 edition of The Atlanta Constitution newspaper via Wikimedia Commons Lauren Nicole Henley, University of Richmond

The Conversation

February 19, 2026

In April 1912, a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet confessed to murdering four families in and around Lafayette, Louisiana. The widespread news coverage at the time effectively branded her a serial killer.

Her confession, however, did not align with the timeline of crimes that had gripped America’s rice belt region with fear. Even today, her guilt is debated.

From November 1909 until August 1912, an unknown assailant – or assailants – zigzagged across southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. Many Black families were slaughtered in their homes under the cover of darkness. An ax – the telltale weapon – was almost always found in the bloody aftermath.

All but one of the scenes were located within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. In each case, a mother and child were always among the victims. Evidence of additional weapons was often found nearby, suggesting a deliberate cruelty to the carnage.

Dubbed the “axman”, the unknown assailant eluded the authorities and terrified local Black communities.

Today, when scholars and laypeople alike discuss Clementine Barnabet, they oscillate between two extremes: portraying her as a fear-inducing, cult-leading Black female serial killer, or as an innocent young Black woman caught in circumstances beyond her control.

In more than a decade of researching Clementine Barnabet, I’ve been struck by how print media created overtly sensationalized accounts of the mythology of the axman and, by extension, the axwoman. Whether Barnabet committed the crimes she said she did – or any of the axman murders, for that matter – is irrelevant to the primary motive the media constructed for her fatal violence: religion.

Diverse faith traditions

In Jim Crow Louisiana, various expressions of faith were possible. The state’s history as a French colony – one that also practiced slavery – meant it was home to the largest percentage of Black Catholics in the United States.

At the same time, religions like Voodoo, that originated in West Africa, reached the region on slave ships. Voodoo was not necessarily at odds with Catholicism; enslaved practitioners creatively adapted their ancestral faith to that of their enslavers.

Some displays of faith were not organized religions at all, but folkways. Hoodoo, for example, has West African origins, though it also draws upon European and Native American elements. Hoodoo practitioners – sometimes called doctors – and their clients often practice a religion, yet they also seek comfort in the supernatural possibilities of their craft.

This craft involves the physical manipulation of earthly elements such as graveyard dirt or plants like John the Conqueror root to achieve magical ends, often resulting in conjures – or ritual objects – needed to bring about desired goals. Conjures are believed to help people protect themselves, harm one’s adversaries, alter one’s circumstances, intervene in one’s relationships and more.

In their most powerful form, believers contend that conjures can bring about a person’s death.

For some believers, elements of Catholicism, Voodoo, Protestantism and hoodoo combine into syncretic faith practices. Incorporating multiple systems of beliefs has been an aspect of many Louisianans’ identities for generations. Most of the time, this blending of practices, ideologies and communities is depicted as a quirky – even “backward” – way to make sense of the world.

Yet during the axman’s reign in the early 1900s, a Black woman’s confession to murder was interpreted through the lens of religious deviance rather than diversity.

A timeline of events

When Barnabet confessed in April 1912, it was technically the second time she had done so. The first time was in November 1911 in the aftermath of the Randall family murder. Five members of the Randall family and their overnight guest had been brutally slaughtered in Lafayette, Louisiana at the end of the month.

According to regional newspapers, Barnabet was in the crowd that had gathered near the Randall family’s home after the murders were discovered. Reportedly, she caught the attention of the local sheriff. Not only did she live near the slain, but, according to a New Orleans daily, the authorities found “her room saturated with blood and covered with human brains.”

Barnabet was given a “third degree” examination – meaning she was tortured – by the New Orleans Police Department, and then supposedly confessed that she had killed the Randalls because, according to a Midwestern newspaper, they “disobeyed the orders of the church.” That church would become a topic of scrutiny and sensationalism by regional lawmen and news outlets alike throughout much of 1912.

At that time, Barnabet is also said to have confessed to killing another family in Lafayette.

Thus, Barnabet had already been in jail for over four months before her springtime confession. Between January and March 1912, four more families had been axed to death between Crowley, Louisiana and Glidden, Texas. In April, when Barnabet re-confessed, she added two more families to her victim roster.

In aggregate, the four families Barnabet confessed to killing had been slain between November 1909 and November 1911. Four more families had been murdered between her arrest and second confession, meaning she was in jail when they occurred. After her second confession and while she was still in custody, another three families were attacked with an ax, though for the first time, people survived the axman.

This convoluted timeline, in which more than half of the axman murders occurred after Barnabet had been apprehended, presented a challenge for investigators. They generally believed the crimes were related. Yet Barnabet could not have physically carried out the attacks in 1912.

To explain the continuation of the killings despite Barnabet’s incarceration, local lawmen leveraged the young woman’s own statements that had landed her in jail in the first place: that religion compelled her to murder.

It was this November 1911 confession that gave investigators the motive of religious fanaticism to attach to the axman crimes. Then, in January 1912, when the Broussards – another Black family – were murdered with an ax in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the local police found a Bible verse scrawled on their front door. This overtly religious symbol appeared roughly two months after Barnabet’s first confession and seemed to confirm her claims.

By April 1912, the idea of religiously motivated serial murder had been circulating in the rice belt region for months.

Hoodoo, conjures, and sensationalism

Barnabet’s confession was transcribed by R. H. Broussard (no relation to the victims), a newspaper reporter for the “New Orleans Item,” in April 1912.

According to the report, Barnabet claimed that she and four friends purchased conjures from a local hoodoo doctor one evening while socializing. They paid the practitioner for his services. Supposedly, the group then used the charms to move about undetected while committing murder.

In both her November 1911 and April 1912 confessions, Barnabet offered faith-based motives, albeit different ones. In the first case, it was the victims who reportedly erred in their religious duties. In the second, it was Barnabet’s own belief in hoodoo that facilitated such carnage. White media outlets did not interpret either of these statements as evidence of the region’s deep history of diverse faith expressions.

Instead, they labeled Barnabet “a black borgia,” “the directing head of a fanatical cult,” and the “Priestess of [a] Colored Human Sacrifice Cult.”

Moreover, sensationalized news coverage labeled the church Barnabet mentioned as the “Sacrifice Church.” Not surprisingly, the press depicted it as a cult-like organization, portraying Barnabet as either a low-level member or the “high priestess.” Sometimes, news reports also conflated the Sacrifice Church with Voodoo, thereby criminalizing a legitimate West African-derived religion as a cult.

According to unsubstantiated media accounts, the so-called Sacrifice Church promoted human sacrifice to gain immortality. Simultaneously, newspapers treated the conjure Barnabet possessed as proof of her fanaticism, reporting her claim that the only reason she confessed was because she had lost her charm.

Combined these selective – and sensational – interpretations of Barnabet’s supposed religious beliefs ignored the possibility of diverse spiritual practices that enriched life in the rice belt region.

Jim Crow and Black faith

I have yet to find evidence the Sacrifice Church existed. My research suggests the white press conflated the word “sacrifice” with the word “sanctified.” This might have been due, in part, to both sensationalism and ignorance.

Pentecostalism, a branch of evangelical Christianity that emphasizes baptism by the Holy Spirit and direct communication from God, started growing in popularity in the U.S. in the early 1900s. Many Pentecostal denominations call their adherents saints and their churches sanctified. Since sanctified churches were relatively new to Louisiana and some Pentecostal teachings – like speaking in tongues – challenged more mainstream Protestant doctrine, Pentecostalism might have contributed to the media’s reporting.

Although the Sacrifice Church may have simply been a linguistic error in reference to any number of sanctified churches in the rice belt, it is possible that Barnabet did indeed possess a conjure. The hoodoo doctor she accused of selling her and her comrades their charms was arrested and questioned by the Lafayette authorities. The statements he gave to the police aligned with hoodoo practices even as he denied knowing Barnabet or being involved in such folkways.

Given the variety of faith practices in Jim Crow Louisiana, it is possible both that Barnabet believed in her conjure and that sanctified churches were growing in popularity in the region. Whether she ever attended one is hard to know, just as the legitimacy of either confession is difficult to determine.

What is clear is that faith anchored the statements Barnabet made to the authorities. The other anchor, however, was murder. The consequences of how these events aligned reverberate in how Barnabet has been depicted.

Barnbet was front-page news in 1912. People knew her name, even as they debated her guilt. When she was convicted of murder, she was sentenced to life at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. A little over a decade later, she was released and disappeared from public view.

Today, however, no Black female serial killer occupies a similar place in America’s collective memory.

In recent years, there have been calls for a more serious acceptance of Black women’s experiences, knowledge and beliefs within the dominant culture. This shift also invites, I believe, a fresh look at Barnabet’s confessions and the crimes that were attributed to her.

Lauren Nicole Henley, Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pharaohs in Dixieland: How 19th-century America reimagined Egypt to justify slavery

Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images Charles Vanthournout, Université de Lorraine

The Conversation

February 19, 2026 

When Napoleon embarked upon a military expedition into Egypt in 1798, he brought with him a team of scholars, scientists and artists. Together, they produced the monumental “Description de l’Égypte,” a massive, multivolume work about Egyptian geography, history and culture.

At the time, the United States was a young nation with big aspirations, and Americans often viewed their country as an heir to the great civilizations of the past. The tales of ancient Egypt that emerged from Napoleon’s travels became a source of fascination to Americans, though in different ways.

In the slaveholding South, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs became a way to justify slavery. For abolitionists and African Americans, biblical Egypt served as a symbol of bondage and liberation.

As a historian, I study how 19th-century Americans – from Southern intellectuals to Black abolitionists – used ancient Egypt to debate questions of race, civilization and national identity. My research traces how a distorted image of ancient Egypt shaped competing visions of freedom and hierarchy in a deeply divided nation.

Egypt inspires the pro-slavery South

In 1819, when lawyer John Overton, military officer James Winchester and future president Andrew Jackson founded a city in Tennessee along the Mississippi River, they christened it Memphis, after the ancient Egyptian capital.

While promoting the new city, Overton declared of the Mississippi River that ran alongside it: “This noble river may, with propriety, be denominated the American Nile.”

“Who can tell that she may not, in time, rival … her ancient namesake, of Egypt in classic elegance and art?” The Arkansas Banner excitedly reported.

In the region’s fertile soil, Chancellor William Harper, a jurist and pro-slavery theorist from South Carolina, saw the promise of an agricultural empire built on slavery, one “capable of being made a far greater Egypt.”

There was a reason pro-slavery businessmen and thinkers were energized by the prospect of an American Egypt: Many Southern planters imagined themselves as guardians of a hierarchical and aristocratic system, one grounded in landownership, tradition and honor. As Alabama newspaper editor William Falconer put it, he and his fellow white Southerners belonged to a race that “had established law, order and government over the earth.”

To them, Egypt represented the archetype of a great hierarchical civilization. Older than Athens or Rome, Egypt conferred a special legitimacy. And just like the pharaohs, the white elites of the South saw themselves as the stewards of a prosperous society sustained by enslaved labor.

Leading pro-slavery thinkers like Virginia social theorist George Fitzhugh, South Carolina lawyer and U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett and Georgia lawyer and politician Thomas R.R. Cobb all invoked Egypt as an example to follow.

“These [Egyptian] monuments show negro slaves in Egypt at least 1,600 years before Christ,” Cobb wrote in 1858. “That they were the same happy negroes of this day is proven by their being represented in a dance 1,300 years before Christ.”

A distorted view of history

But their view of history didn’t exactly square with reality. Slavery did exist in ancient Egypt, but most slaves had been originally captured as prisoners of war.

The country never developed a system of slavery comparable to that of Greece or Rome, and servitude was neither race-based nor tied to a plantation economy. The mistaken notion that Egypt’s great monuments were built by slaves largely stems from ancient authors and the biblical account of the Hebrews. Later, popular culture – especially Hollywood epics – would continue to advance this misconception.

Nonetheless, 19th-century Southern intellectuals drew on this imagined Egypt to legitimize slavery as an ancient and divinely sanctioned institution.

Even after the Civil War, which ended in 1865, nostalgia for these myths of ancient Egypt endured. In the 1870s, former Confederate officer Edward Fontaine noted how “Veritable specimens of black, woolyheaded negroes are represented by the old Egyptian artists in chains, as slaves, and even singing and dancing, as we have seen them on Southern plantations in the present century.”

Turning Egypt white

But to claim their place among the world’s great civilizations, Southerners had to reconcile a troubling fact: Egypt was located in Africa, the ancestral land of those enslaved in the U.S.

In response, an intellectual movement called the American School of Ethnology – which promoted the idea that races had separate, unequal origins to justify Black inferiority and slavery – set out to “whiten” Egypt.

In a series of texts and lectures, they portrayed Egypt as a slaveholding civilization dominated by whites. They pointed to Egyptian monuments as proof of the greatness that a slave society could achieve. And they also promoted a scientifically discredited theory called “polygenesis,” which argued that Black people did not descend from the Bible’s Adam, but from some other source.

Richard Colfax, the author of the 1833 pamphlet “Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists,” insisted that “the Egyptians were decidedly of the Caucasian variety of men.” Most mummies, he added, “bear not the most distant resemblance to the negro race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton cited “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1822 German study of Egyptian skulls, to reinforce this view. Writing in the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, he explained how the German study had concluded that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, it established “the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton’s “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1844 study of Egyptian skulls, reinforced this view. He argued that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, noted the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, Morton established “the Negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Physician Josiah C. Nott, Egyptologist George Gliddon and physician and propagandist John H. Van Evrie formed an effective triumvirate: Through press releases and public lectures featuring the skulls of mummies, they turned Egyptology into a tool of pro-slavery propaganda.

“The Negro question was the one I wished to bring out,” Nott wrote, adding that he “embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography.”

Nott and Gliddon’s 1854 bestseller “Types of Mankind” fused pseudoscience with Egyptology to both “prove” Black inferiority and advance the idea that their beloved African civilization was populated by a white Egyptian elite.

“Negroes were numerous in Egypt,” they write, “but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.”

Denouncing America’s pharaohs

This distorted vision of Egypt, however, wasn’t the only one to take hold in the U.S., and abolitionists saw this history through a decidedly different lens.

In the Bible, Egypt occupies a central place, mentioned repeatedly as a land of refuge – notably for Joseph – but also as a nation of idolatry and as the cradle of slavery.

The episode of the Exodus is perhaps the most famous reference. The Hebrews, enslaved under an oppressive pharaoh, are freed by Moses, who leads them to the Promised Land, Canaan. This biblical image of Egypt as a land of bondage deeply shaped 19th-century moral and political debates: For many abolitionists, it represented the ultimate symbol of tyranny and human oppression.

When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Black people could be heard singing in front of the White House, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt Land … Tell Jeff Davis to let my people go.”

Black Americans seized upon this biblical parallel. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a contemporary pharaoh, with Moses still the prophet of liberation.

African American writers and activists like Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth also invoked Egypt as a tool of emancipation.

“In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom,” Wheatley wrote in a 1774 letter. “It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance; and by the leave of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that the same principle lives in us.”

Yet the South’s infatuation with Egypt shows how antiquity can always be recast to serve the powerful. And it’s a reminder that the past is far from neutral terrain – that there is rarely, if ever, a ceasefire in wars over history and memory.

This article has been updated to correctly attribute Samuel George Morton as the author of “Crania Aegyptiaca,” not as the author of the Charleston Medical Journal article. Quoted texts from Phillis Wheatley and William Falconer have also been slightly amended for accuracy.

Charles Vanthournout, Ph.D. Student in Ancient History, Université de Lorraine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.