Books

Black Scare/Red Scare

By Charisse Burden-Stelly

In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. Black Scare / Red Scare, meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.

Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Black Scare/Red Scare traces the "longue durée" of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. It theorizes two bases of the Black Scare/Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. It highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, the text incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.

Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing

Edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

Organize, Fight, Win fills a gap in the available scholarly and activist literature on the contributions of Black communist and “fellow-traveler” women in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. No such collection currently exists. These collected writings demonstrate that women including Claudia Jones, Grace Campbell, Williana Burroughs, Lorraine Hansberry, Dorothy Hunton, Charlotta Bass, and Thyra Edwards exercised revolutionary leadership in the international anti-imperialist proletarian struggle. Collections on the writing of Black women rarely include the contributions of communists and their sympathizers, distorting Black history, women’s history, US history, and depriving the movement of valuable knowledge as they often confine Black women’s activism to a liberal, domestic, and/or feminist frame. Triple Jeopardy and World Revolution illuminates how Marxism, anti-imperialism, and internationalism shaped the politics of a group of Black women committed to the liberation of working, racialized, and oppressed peoples, with a particular focus on the “triple oppression” of Black women workers.

 Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State

Edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Aaron Kamugisha

Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State collects key essays on the Caribbean by Percy Hintzen, the foremost political sociologist in Anglophone-Caribbean studies. For the past 30 years, Percy Hintzen has been one of the most articulate and discerning critics of the post-colonial state in Caribbean scholarship, making seminal contributions to the study of Caribbean politics, sociology, political economy, and diaspora studies. Reproducing Domination collects some of Hintzen’s most important Caribbean essays over a twenty-year period, from 1995 to the present. These works have broadened and deepened his earlier work on the post-colonial elites in The Costs of Regime Survival to encompass the entire Anglophone Caribbean; interrogated the formation and consolidation of the postcolonial Caribbean state; and theorized the role of race and ethnicity in Caribbean politics. Given the recent global resurgence of interest in elite ownership patterns and their relationship to power and governance, Hintzen’s work assumes even more resonance beyond the shores of the Caribbean. Along with co-editing the volume, Charisse Burden-Stelly contributes an epilogue titled, “Between Culture and Political Economy: Percy Hintzen as Theorist of Racial Capitalism.”