In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. Dr. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. Their book is The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Jeanelle K. Hope: Readers wondering why Black people, Muslims, immigrants and people from the Global South remain the targets of global fascism will find answers in our book. We argue that fascism is always “anti-black” because it is rooted in systems of slavery, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation of the non-white world. We also argue that Black people have always been among the best and leading fighters *against* fascism. We begin with Ida B. Wells, who saw similarities between pogroms committed against Jews to lynchings of Black people. Or W.E.B. Du Bois and the little-known Thyra Edwards, who both traveled to Germany and wrote about the threat of fascism well before the rest of American did. We call Black people “pre-mature” antifascists who, because they have always been among fascism’s first victims, have always been among the first to fight back.
Regarding the current climate of protest against Israel, our book helps us understand how an analysis of settler-colonialism is essential to understanding the modern world. It’s important, for example, that South Africa—a Black-majority country victimized by European colonialism—is the one bringing the charge of genocide against Israel. They are exercising the same kind of analysis that led the Civil Rights Congress to charge the U.S. with genocide, seeing the long history of “premature death” of African-Americans as a legacy of slavery, colonialism, and settler violence. These are, we argue, ingredients for analyzing and understanding not just Germany’s holocaust but others before and after.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
At the onset, we knew we didn’t want this book to simply read like a flat historical or theoretical text. We want the book to have use within classrooms, organizing spaces, the streets, and beyond. Thus, it was really important for us to underscore the tactics or antifascist methods that were used within this tradition—and each chapter does that.
We hope activists and community organizers will learn from and incorporate Black organizing and an understanding of the centrality of anti-Blackness to fascism. We offer a lot of different models for antifascist organizing in the book: Communist, Pan-African, anarchist, Black feminist, abolitionist. We also resurrect some individuals and groups from history that we can are great role models for antifascist organizing: Ida B. Wells, Thrya Edwards, the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, the We Charge Genocide collective. These folks used a variety of very effective and differing strategies to fight fascism. We pay special attention to prison organizing against fascism. People like George Jackson, and the Black Panther Party, who saw prisons and mass incarceration as manifestations of fascist thinking and fascist tactics. We think the abolitionist movement to abolish prisons can be even stronger by incorporating techniques and analysis used in the Black Antifascist Tradition.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
We hope to debunk the myth that fascism *only* happened in Germany and Italy between the wars, *only* happens in Europe, and *only* victimizes certain groups of people. Following people like Aimé Césaire and the Civil Rights Congress, we argue that fascism exists in the groundwater of western capitalism, colonialism and slavery. One of the first examples of fascism we look at is German colonization of Namibia and Southwest Africa which included torture, the first internment camps of the 20th century, medical experiments and genocide. The Germans learned some of these tactics from the United States’ treatment of the Native American population. So we follow people like Walter Rodney, who argues that many of the historical events that led to fascism in Europe happened outside of Europe, including the U.S., and that both fascism and anti-fascism are only understandable as *global phenomenon* tightly linked up with events in the African diaspora.
Furthermore, this book makes a major intervention in scholarship on antifascism, which has largely focused on the efforts and activism of white people. We hope readers are able to dismantle the notion that antifascism as a politic, movement, and organizing strategy is something wholly owned and embraced by white activists. This book illustrates how Black people have been at the center of organizing, writing, and theorizing in the name of antifascism.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
Ida B. Wells is someone that is a recurring figure throughout the book and our discussions. While most know her as the “Mother of the Anti-Lynching movement,” an original Black Women’s Club, and one of founders of the NAACP, in our book we give her a new name—premature Black antifascist. Diving into Wells’ two pamphlets—Red Record and Southern Horrors—she describes the epidemic of lynchings sweeping the south during and immediately following the reconstruction era as being eerily similar to the pogroms Russian Jews were subjected to. She quickly recognizes lynchings as state-sanctioned acts and argues that this injustice is a “conspiracy.” She details how the law, law enforcement, and white supremacists are all part of this newly evolved system to ensure Black immiseration and death. Wells predates the formal use of fascism as a term, however, we argue that much of what she described was fascism.
Her work was so pioneering, it would prove to be foundational to the development of many antifascist movements, organizations, activists, and thinkers. Wells work was instrumental in the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign. The Black Women’s Club movement would similarly take up an antilynching lobbying campaign inspired by Wells. And Wells’ data would also be included in the Civil Rights Congress and William Patterson’s United Nations petition to charge the United States with genocide. She shows up again in our discussion of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s 2012 report on extrajudicial killings entitled, “Operation Ghetto Storm.” For many, Wells is among the first to document this concerted genocidal effort against Black people in the United States. We also see her as one of the earliest to connect this genocidal project with an analysis of the state that gestures toward what would later more formally be called fascism.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
I’m currently reading and wrestling with Joshua Myers’ Of Black Study. I deeply appreciate his analysis on the evolution of Black Studies and scholar-activists that have worked to ensure the field remains (un)disciplined and in pursuit of a “conceptual and epistemological freedom.” As someone that currently directs a Black studies program at an HBCU, this book has been incredibly generative in helping me grapple with what it means to do this work in a neoliberal university, and how to ensure the anti-colonial, community focused, liberation-oriented, and antifascist roots of Black studies remain at center.
William C. Anderson’s The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition has been another book that I’ve found to be captivating and has been especially generative in developing my understanding and theorizing of anarchisms. At its core, this work argues that Black Americans have never truly benefited from nor been protected by their citizenship. Thus, he calls upon Black people to see themselves and organize beyond borders. He reimagines this organizing through the lens of Black anarchism or “a complete transcendence and break from the way our struggles currently are to see them overturned to what they could be.” Anderson uplifts the work of Black anarchists like Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Lucy Parsons, thus, detailing the evolution of Black anarchist thought and practice. This text was instrumental in the development of one of the latter chapters in The Black Antifascist Tradition.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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