Upstream - Black Scare / Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

The Red Scare — perhaps most well known through the era of McCarthyism that dominated the social, political, and legal spheres of the U.S. in the 1950s — is actually much more than just a brief window of time where communists in the United States were vilified, criminalized, and blacklisted. The Red Scare is actually much more pervasive and longstanding, originating decades before McCarthyism and stretching well into the present. And, when combined with the Black Scare — the fear and hatred of Black people in the United States — it really forms an entire mode of governance that has shaped the character, policies, and collective consciousness of much of U.S.’s 20th and 21st centuries.  To talk about the Black Scare, the Red Scare, and how they work together to create a specific hegemonic atmosphere and policy landscape in the U.S., we’ve brought on Charisse Burden-Stelly, an Associate Professor of African American studies at Wayne State University, a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace, and author of Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, published by the University of Chicago Press.  In this conversation, we discuss the history of the Red and Black Scares by looking at a few different examples of how these modes of governance overlapped and shaped both policies and people in the 20th century. We also explore how these scares have followed us into the present and how they shape and color more contemporary moments like the George Floyd uprisings, the Stop Cop City movement, or the various solidarity movements for Palestinian liberation here in the United States. Further Resources: Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing Upstream: The Limitations of Black Capitalism with Francisco Perez Upstream: Abolition with Niki Franco AKA Venus Roots This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.      

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Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you've thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The Red Scare. Perhaps most well-known through the era of McCarthyism, the dominated the social, political, and legal spheres of the US in the 1950s, is actually much more than a brief window of time where

communists in the United States were vilified, criminalized, and blacklisted. The red scare is actually much more pervasive and long-standing, originating decades before McCarthyism and stretching well into the present. And when combined with the black scare, the fear and hatred of black people in the United States, it forms an entire mode of governance that has shaped the character, policies, and collective consciousness of much of the US's 20th and 21st centuries. To talk about the black scare, the red scare, and how they work together to create a specific hegemonic atmosphere and policy landscape in the US. We've brought on Sherice Burton Stelly, an associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University, a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, a member of

the Black Alliance for Peace, and author of BlackScare RedScare, theorizing capitalist racism in the United States, published by University of Chicago Press. In this conversation, we discuss the history of the RedScare and BlackScare by looking at a few different examples of how these modes of governance Overlapped and shaped both policies and people in the 20th century We also explore how these scares have followed us into the present and how they color more contemporary movements like the George Floyd Uprising's the stop cop city movement or the various solidarity movements for Palestinian liberation here in the United States. And before we get started, just a quick note, upstream is entirely listener-funded.

We could not do this without the support of our listeners and fans. If you haven't yet, and can, and you're in a place where you can afford to do so, please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a one time or recurring donation. Also, if you can, please go to Apple Podcast and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also go to Spotify now

and leave us a review there too. This really helps get upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. We do not have a marketing budget or anything like that for upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Thank you.

And now, here's Robert in conversation with Dr. Sharice Burton-Stellie. Cherisse it is a pleasure to have you on the show. I'm wondering to start if you could briefly introduce yourself for our listeners and also maybe tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write BlackScare, RedScare. Yeah, so I am an associate professor of African-American studies at Wayne State University and I'm currently a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University for 2023-2024.

And I'm a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. I did my graduate studies, PhD in African DAS for Studies at the University of California Berkeley. And broadly, my research focuses on the Black, radical tradition, or what I call the tradition of radical blackness, the intersections of anti-communism and anti-black racial oppression, racial capitalism, and US imperialism, primarily in the 20th century.

And so, all of those things, sort of black studies, studies of imperialism, intersections of anti-communism and anti-black racial oppression, obviously animate my text, black scare, red scare. And my first sort of line of inquiry into the themes of the book came out of my dissertation project and the animating question for that was really why were there no Marxist politically economists or even much politically economy at

all in black studies and so that opened up kind of many lines of inquiry one of which was looking at how at that time I was calling it like anti-blackness, anti-radicalism, anti-communism, informed US, society, and its institutions, including the university. for writing the book was thinking about racial capitalism, which I've written about in various venues previously. And what I have found was that in a lot of the readings I had done on racial capitalism, it really wasn't defined or operationalized well. And so one of the questions that came out of sort of how to define racial capitalism or think about it was in a political economy that is structured by racial hierarchy and economic exploitation, who are the enemies that are constructed, and what are the sort of discourses and ideology that uphold the marginalization, repression, and discrediting of these entities. And I found that sort of in my research, two of those main enemies of the state, if you

will, were radicals, particularly communists and black people, and that black radicals, as well, held up a particularly sort of subversive position according to the state within US society. And so black scare red scare really looks at those dynamics specifically between World War One and the early Cold War. Awesome. Yeah, that's a really great overview. And I just wanted to say too that right after I read your book, I read Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, and it was really interesting because Jackson's really, you know, the embodiment, right, of this black scare, red scare thesis. There are a lot of parallels in how he actually wrote that the black revolutionary is twice

doomed, once for the color of their skin, and then again for their politics, right? And I'm wondering if you could maybe describe for us what the black scare was and what the red scare was. I think most people are somewhat familiar with the red scare, but also, yeah, I mean, if you could unpack what you mean by the black scare and how these two scares are imbricated and how anti-blackness and anti-communism really shaped the United States in the 20th century.

Yeah, so the black scare really comes out of not only the condition of sort of African enslavement, but really that post-bellum moment. So the Civil War was one of the largest expropriations in history, unlike sort of British slave owners or slave owners elsewhere, US slave owners were largely uncompensated. And so people like Gerald Horn and Rayford Logan and others would argue that part of the drive for the anti-black racial oppression and extreme repression of black folks in the US South

was a sort of effort of white slave owners and their descendants to really reclaim the property and value that they had lost with emancipation. And then also the sort of deep hatred that comes out of your former property, asserting themselves as equals. And so the black scare sort of comes out of both that psychological but also kind of political, economic reality.

And so the black scare is twofold. It's on the one hand a sort of fear or hostility toward Black equality, a fear of Black domination, and a Black self-determination on the one hand, but also a fear of white evaluation. And, you know, the eradication of what, you know, what has been called the wages of whiteness or what we might call epidermal capital.

And so as a set of ideologies, discourses, policies, practices, and norms that whip up sort of fear and hostility against black people in order to maintain racial hierarchy. And the red scare is broadly an attack on and discrediting of anti-capitalist, specifically socialist, communist, and anarchist ideas, organizations, and modes of political economic organizing through an imposition of the idea that the American way of life and liberal capitalism for economic organizing through an imposition of the idea that the American way of life and liberal capitalism specifically are the only legitimate ways

of being in the world and that any challenge to that from the left presents an existential threat. And so again, there's a set of policies, discourses, legislation, and sort of practices in civil society that push radicals or political minorities to the constitutive outside of the state and render their, in many ways, their very presence in institutions and organizations in society as a threat to the American way of life, as subversive, as audacious, and as serving, some external threat, whether it be the Soviet Union

or China, and our contemporary times, it's sort of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, whoever the enemies from without are. Communists, as a shorthand for many full types, radicalism are the sort of enemies from within who are infiltrating US society with these dangerous and pernicious and unpatriotic ideas. And then the reframe, especially in the sort of

height of the Cold War is like, you know, that these people are trying to overthrow the US government by force or violence. In earlier moments like around World War I, for example, and even before World War I, really the primary threat were anarchists and the industrial workers of the world, so syndicolists. And so a lot of the earlier anti-radiological legislation is geared at eradicating those two kind of entities. And the IWW in particular was particularly odious to the US state, because it was also interracial.

Even though there was a comparatively small number of black workers in the IWW, because at that time, a really small number of industrial black workers, the fact that this largely immigrant, largely militant union would allow black people on equal footing, at least rhetorically, was a nathema to a racial capitalist society, that's fundamentally rooted in racial hierarchy.

And so the way that the black scarecare and the Redscare come together are that on the one hand, if it is that Black liberation is a completed project, then that would necessarily require a collapse of the economic status quo. And if it is that economic democracy, socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is implemented that it means that the racial hierarchy was fundamentally collapsed. And that means that those savage and human undeserving black folks will then, again, be on equal economic and political footing as white folks. And so these scares work together to produce sort of black liberation and

the collapse of capitalism as these sort of mutually constitutive threats that both threaten the essential underpinnings of US society Yeah, that's a really helpful overview and I'm wondering too you mentioned capitalism, and we've explored that theme in previous episodes with folks like Francisco Perez and Nikki Franco. But I'm also wondering if you could maybe just also walk us through how racial hierarchy is a fundamental component of capitalism. And this idea too that you bring up in the book of super exploitation of the black pearl literate in capitalism. Yeah. So basically, I use the term capitalist

racism. And basically, I define it in this book as a racially hierarchical politically economy and social order, constituting labor super exploitation, expropriation by domination and ongoing racial colonial primitive accumulation. So first, I use the term capitalist racism as opposed to racial capitalism, which is a term that really, the latter was really popularized by Sajrach Robinson. So there's a whole other genealogy of racial capitalism that traces back to South African thinkers,

like Neville Alexander, Bernard McLeodbony, Legasic, and others. But most people know about racial capitalism through Cedric Robinson, which the historian Peter James Hudson explains that his idea of racial capitalism is really more of a politically philosophy, whereas the South Africans were offering up more of a politically economy. And part of what Cedric Robinson argues out in his theory of racial capitalism is that racialism in the way that we know it in terms of human differentiation really starts in the futile

era and kind of gets inculcated into capitalism as a world system. My understanding of what I call capitalist racism is looking at the capitalist system as such in the forms of racialization, particularly anti-black racialization, that are an outgrowth of capitalism proper, right? The growth and proliferation of capitalism as a world system. And obviously in my text, I'm looking specifically at the United States. And so, for example, there are things that Robinson would call racialism in the feudal era that I would just call sort of like, F-no nationalist, or different forms of hierarchy that I wouldn't necessarily call racialism.

Whereas, there are particular forms of racial hierarchy that are, I think, a product of transatlantic enslavement and the ways it shaped both the rise and development of capitalism. But I focus on super exploitation, expropriation, and ongoing primitive accumulation because it really gets at the violent nature of these forms and how there are certain groups whose experience of exploitation and domination and dispossession go above and beyond that of the white working class. And so when I'm thinking about racial capitalism, or capitalist racism, I'm looking at those dynamics like who is fitted for, to be worked to death, for example, have those dynamics like who is fitted for, to be worked to death, for example, whose land can you take without recourse? Who has the worst and most onerous working conditions

who was the last hired in first fire? So from whom is the most super profit extracted? Right? And so it's looking at those very intense forms of exploitation and oppression and domination that really are central to and ongoing in the capitalist system and all of its forms So it's not some pre-capitalist reality that those forms of brutal oppression are really ongoing and really sort of a crew around, especially around bodies that are racialized as black. So that's sort of how I operationalized, previously I've called it like modern US racial capitalism and this

text I call it capitalist racist society, but that's really what I'm trying to look at those sort of deep and daring intersections of accumulation, violence, and like brutal expropriation. So I'm wondering, you know, in the book you outlined so many different ways that the black scare and the red scare were implemented in U.S. policy. And I'm wondering if maybe you can share some examples, either of local, state, or federal policies, or all of the above, to flesh out a bit how this anti-blackness and anti-communism actually became a mode of governance. And I mean, I think a lot of folks are familiar

with the Cold War era, McCarthyism, and that kind of stuff, but you get into such more granular detail. And this all started so much earlier than, you know, the 1950s. So I'm wondering, yeah, if you can just kind of give us a sense of how this played out in policy and how this was really a mode of governance.

Yeah, and so I talk about anti-communism as a mode of governance to move away from this idea that it was the short-lived epoch in US history that's kind of reducible to what we would call McCarthyism. So like the 1950s, some might include like Coantel, poor on the 1960s. And that was the sort of era of anti-communism. They might reference like the 1919 moment of the red scare, but part of what I try to get at is that this anti-radi-calism

or that the ongoing effort to repress political minorities and the ongoing realities of the subjection of racial minorities is really foundational to US policy and practice and so One of the things that I look at for example is like the espionage act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which were these policies implemented during World War One, that basically made it illegal to critique the US government to disgrace the US flag, to sort of destroy like a military uniform, like all of these very kind of draconian-enforced patriotism that if contravened would render one sort of subversive, right? And so one of the biggest cases during World War One was the case against the industrial

workers of the world. And again, it wasn't only because they were a militant labor organization, they were accused of being pro-German. They were accused of, and they were targeted because they were anti-war. Even though they had sort of tempered down their anti-war protest and sentiment during the war, precisely so they would not be, you know, draw the eye of the US government.

They were nonetheless targeted. But they also, again, were targeted because they were an insuracial labor organization. So the way that the United States implements or sort of formulates these policies like the S edition act and the SBNAS act is to really crack down on behaviors that they find to be sort of dangerous or that they find to be a means by which foreign ideas or or foreign machinations can creep into the United States. So that's one example.

A second example is during World War II, Jay Edgar Hoover, who's actually a kind of central figure throughout the whole period that I study because of his role in the BI and the FBI. He commissioned this report called Raycon, the racial conditions report during World War II, where he's looking at Black unrest as a form of subversion during the war. And part of what his argument is is that Black unrest, even if Black people are contesting like lynching, even if they're just struggling to be included in wartime industry, even if they are just protesting their terrible living conditions

that this is sowing dissent, and that this dissent causes sort of disorder throughout US society, and that undermines or disrupts the war effort. And that any racial riots or any racial unrest that's happening is the fault of black people. And not only that, it's also the machinations of organizations like the Communist Party

or some particular like Japanese organizations. But always the underlying idea is that black people the Communist Party or some particular like Japanese organizations. But always the underlying idea is that black people are particularly susceptible to subversive or disruptive or foreign ideas. And so their very struggle for equality or freedom is seen to be anathema to the state over and above white terrorism for example. So it's not the violence of white folks that threatens the war effort. It's sort of black pushback against that. And this becomes surveilled, it becomes

disciplined, it becomes heavily documented. And then this becomes the basis for the continuation of the misconstrual of black folks as not ready for citizenship even in peacetime. And so this is sort of what I mean by a mode of governance. There's an anti-radiacalism that's appended to anti-black racial oppression that becomes a way of organizing society that becomes inculcated in legislation that dictates how the courts operate and that really

kind of infuse a society writ large. I'm wondering you know you bring up a lot of different characters in the book and I'm wondering if maybe you could share the story of you know one or two characters that you bring up that might illustrate some of the ways in which the black scarer and the red scar overlapped. And you know how radical blackness was punished particularly severely in the United States. Yeah, so there's two people I can talk about. One is Marcus Garvey and one is Angela herndon. There's two people I can talk about. One is Marcus Garvey and one is Angela Herndon. So Marcus Garvey is important. He is the sort of organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. He is a pan-Africanist, a black nationalist, and he's best known for like the back to African movement. He organized the largest black movement in the world before

or since. But the interesting thing about Marcus Garvey is that he was not a communist, he was not a socialist. And certainly after 1921, he was very critical of communism and socialism and saying that it was unfitted for black people that communists were trying to manipulate black people that if there came a clash between the capitalist world and

the socialist world, black people should side with whoever won. He also thought that communism would ultimately put the worst of white folks, which for him was white working people in power to the detriment of black people. And this was sort of a development in his thought earlier on. people. And this was sort of a development in his thought. Earlier on, Garvey was actually approving of the Bolshevik revolution. He congratulated Lenin and said that he respected Lenin. But what happened was, De Edgar Hoover was targeting Garvey almost from, you know, the time he arrived in the United States. Once Garvey formed the Black Star Line, which was a line of ships that was supposed to create sort of commerce between the Black world, he went on this tour to sell shares for the Black

Star Line to the Caribbean and Central America and Deh Eger Hoover worked very hard to get him barred from re-entering the United States. And so a trip that was supposed to take about a month and it ended up taking more than six months. And so after that happened, that was in, I wanna say, 1919, Garvey moderated his position. And that's when he started to take up more of our ruling anti-communism. But even having taken that position,

Garvey was still red baited. Garvey was still subjected to anti-communist logic. So for example, the first black people to work for the Bureau of Investigation were sent to infiltrate the UNIA. UNIA and another organization called the African Blood Brotherhood. And part of what, if you look at all of these reports that were given, what they would say was that, you know, Garveyism articulated a lot of the same positions as the Bolsheviks, that they were influenced by the Bolsheviks, that because it had a large with Indian population,

that this group was particularly susceptible to the ideas of communism and socialism. And so even as Garbism tried to distance himself from the red tank, if you will, he was still subjected to those logics. And so that's why Garvey is a really important figure, because part of what I try to argue is that all forms of radicalism ultimately can be easily construed as communism or a communist plot or a fellow traveler of communism, if it has anything in common.

So for example, both the communists and the Garveyites believe in Black self-determination. And so on that grounds alone, spurious claims can be made that they are effectively sort of one and the same or at least are incahoops. Ultimately, Marcus Garvey was deported in 1927. Again his organization was heavily infiltrated. Some of the first sort of counterintelligence work was levied against the UNIA. And a lot of this had to do with the fact that Garvey believed in Africa for the Africans.

He believed in Black, so the termination. And this was seen as extraordinarily dangerous to your American imperialism. The second person I look at is Angela Herndon. So in 1932, he was Indicted by the Atlanta government for insurrection and this was a law the insurrection law They did all the way back to slave times right that it was a law that was essentially codified to criminalize any Gatherings or any sort of insurgency by the enslaved to challenge the slave system and

it was just tweaked in a minor way in the post-Bellum era to continue to discipline primarily, you know, dissident folks who ostensibly were trying to overthrow the government of Georgia by force or violence. And this was a law under which Angela Herndon was invited primarily for organizing an interracial march whereby a group of people in Atlanta were getting pushed off of the relief roles during the Great Depression.

And this was money and resources that they needed for sustenance. And so this march was organized under the auspices of the unemployed councils. And ultimately, the names were restored on these relief roles, and the government had to end up having to pay. And so there were a number of problems with this, right?

Number one was the fact that Angela Herndon was the leader of an interracial march. And so this relates to anti-black racial oppression because it's one thing to be a leader of black people. It's quite another to assert yourself as a leader of an interracial group, which means that white people are following the lead of black people. Secondly, it defies the social norms of black and white people being separate. Secondly, as a member of the Communist Party, it was assumed that any form of sort of agitation that

people like Angela Herndon would engage in are meant to overthrow the government, right? Even if they're just organizing for basic rights that are ostensibly enshrined in the Constitution because it's communists, it's supposed to be directed by some foreign government, either so be it union, and meant to sort of so dissent and to confuse the population. And so ultimately, what led to her and his arrest was that they found communist literature on his person. He was arrested and because he was charged with insurrection, he could have received the death penalty.

He was found guilty initially, but the mercy of the Southern Cour Court was that he just got 20 years on the chain gang. And so there, there were a lot of appeals and ultimately the case was overturned. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court two times. But the point is that even before his indictment in Atlanta, he had been harassed throughout the South, he had been thrown in jail a number of times, beaten, brutalized, and attacked fire from jobs, simply for being a black communist. And so he is another person that conveys how, as Gerald Horn would say, to be red was bad,

to be black and red was to be essentially graduated. And so he was everything that, not only the South, but throughout the United States, everything that the US state feared, right? And throughout his trials, he was black-baited in terms of, they accused him or they pointed out that he was defying the racial norms and he was trying to create conditions whereby black men could sleep with white women, right? Then he was red-baited. It was said that he wanted to start a negro

Republican-as-outh. There they were referring to the Black Belt Nation thesis. So they wanted to expropriate white landowners and form a black-republic in the South under the leadership of the Soviet Union. So he was conveyed as like the devil incarnate because he was a black communist. And this was not reducible to her and this was something that was not uncommon. And this is why I say in chapter three, I call it this, this trope, right, the red black or the black red, that this was kind of like the worst thing you could be the worst most dangerous person was like a black communist at this time You're listening to an upstream conversation with dr. Sharice birdon stelly author of black scare red scare. We'll be right back. That if you get it I might send myself free But I won't dump you sparring Will you be surprised calling my foothold

And let I choose I play I try to hide the hope from you And now I sit out I'm in the air, in the air, in the air I sit out, in the eyes of my god, in the air I won't come this moment, with a present explain to us on the ground And then I drown I'm going to go It's fucking to see You're the one I'm blue You said I'd see And if I can't see, it won't wanna be you

You said I'd see, if there's nothing here Then it's probably mine Well mine, mine turns to sea If there's nothing here long, it'll always be mine Mine, I won't stop this murder With a piece of glass, curly mouth, the road And I'm not out yet I guess I'm lost The taste of the days, the will always fall

I, I guess I'm lost If it's in the door of my own I can't always tell Cause I woke up this morning With a prisoner's blintes on the ground And then I'd drown Yes And if I don't see, it's my world of you. I'm here! That was for WANTEV by Rights of Spring. Now back to our conversation with Dr. Sheree Spurden-Stellie. So you've talked about this, but I think it's an important point to really underscore an

important question to kind of unpack like what particularly makes this red black or black red combination so dangerous to the US establishment. You underscored the two examples of Garvey and Herndon. Those are just two examples, right, of countless, countless examples. And what comes to mind for me that might be a bit more commonly known, perhaps, are figures like Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by the US state in collaboration with the Chicago PD, or even, you know, Martin Luther King Jr., who was also assassinated, of course, I think a year or so before Fred Hampton, the enduring black scare and red scare thesis

was really embodied in these two figures. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the context of the black revolutionary being doomed as George Jackson put it or doubly flagellated as you paraphrased Gerald Horn saying, this idea of why these black reds or red blacks are so dangerous to US capitalist racist hegemony. Yeah, it's sort of like it's double dipping, right? Because on the one hand, it's like black people are already suspicious. They're already not quite citizens.

They can't really be trusted because they're considered to be these ignorant kind of empty vessels. They're particularly susceptible to some type of foreign influence or foreign machinations. Prior to the Communist Party, it was a fear of Black pro-Germanism or Black sympathy with Japan. So Black people are always already sort of suspects, not least because they are second class citizens, right? The same applies to radicals, especially communists, because they're considered to be just doops of Moscow. They're considered to be the enemies of capitalism. They're considered to be the enemies of liberalism.

They are painted as sneaky and manipulative and dangerous. And so a black communist or a black revolutionary, so to speak, which in the mind of the US government is the same thing, you're taking the worst of politics and the worst of race and putting them together, right? Especially during the how did the Cold War as decolonization starts to take off, black radicals become particularly dangerous because they're making these international linkages. They're not only calling for equality at home, they're also calling for decolonization and an into U.S. imperialism.

And the majority of the world is racialized. And so there's a way that black people in the United States can point to their conditions and connect them to the terrible conditions of other racialized people throughout the world and really challenge the way that the US narrates itself as the arbiters of democracy and freedom and liberal equality. All black people just say is a Jim Crow, you know. And so as the United States,

during the Cold War is battling with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the decolonizing world, black people really show that the emperor has no clothes. And so it's a combination of their internationalism. It's a combination of their challenge to social hierarchy. It's their challenge to super exploitation and being a sort of a fundamentally sub-proletariat class. All of these things come together in the black radical that make them everything that the US tries to suppress and repress.

And interestingly, so in chapter three, I'm gonna have these three tropes. One is the West Indie and one is the outside aditator. One is the red black, black red. And I had initially named the red black, black, red, the nigger communist, because that was actually a phrase that was used by a congressman to refer to Paul Robison. And that also was a phrase that was used by member of the House of Representatives in the 1920s

referring to the dire anti-lynching bill that had come up a few times, that was trying to pass a federal anti-lynching bill. Member of the House of Representatives claims that, you know, nigger communists are trying to get this bill passed, right? To embarrassing the United States and challenges social more. And so, but external reviewers were like, that term will be too drawing, so I changed it.

But I think, but that term really shows, like the two foundational slurs, or two foundational slurs of the society, to be called the N word, right? And then to be called a communist because, you know, throughout various points in history to be called a communist mate, you can lose your job, right?

It meant that you could not work for the federal government. It meant that you could be cast out of organizations. It meant that civil rights and liberties didn't pertain to you. It meant that you could be thrown in jail. So when those two come together through like Black people, and that is to say when Black people are communists, it creates a double bind and a double threat. And there was an organization, for example,

called the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership that pointed out precisely this, that so much of the red baiting, so much of the anti-communism that was happening, was meant to scare black people from organizing for their civil rights, because you could be called a communist, right? Because if you were pushing for better working conditions or for any type of social equality, because the Communist Party is sick for that, too, if so facto, you could be called a communist, and therefore, anything that you're struggling for any type of social equality because the Communist Party sit for that too. If so facto you could be called a Communist and therefore anything that you're struggling for could be delegitimized. And again this was very dangerous and

so this is what organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, even the National Council of Negro Women, really took a sort of Cold War liberal line or anti-communist line where they were saying we are struggling for civil rights but we're not like them. We're not like those communists. We are American. We are patriots. And so by pushing an anti-communist line, they could try to challenge the Black scare by taking up the Red scare. And this was, you know, something that Black people were forced to do, not least because it is true that black people compared to other populations who are more sympathetic

to communism or more sympathetic to this idea of economic and social equality for obvious reasons, right? And because they were thinking, it is not the Soviet Union that is hanging us from trees. In fact, when people would travel to the Soviet Union, they would see racial equality. Absolutely. And if I remember correctly, I think you touched on this in the book. One of the really radicalizing or eye-opening impacts was when Black soldiers were fighting during World War II in Europe. And while they were stationed abroad, they'd experience how much better they were treated in Europe, you know, relative than in the US. And, you know, they'd question like,

why the fuck are we fighting for the US, which doesn't give us any of the rights or dignity that are afforded to black people, again, relatively in Europe. And a lot of, you know, returning black troops were radicalized from that experience, right? Yeah, so I think that they were radicalized before that, but having a more cosmopolitan experience, like traveling, seeing other black people, fighting alongside Africans from other parts of the diaspora, and yes, being treated with relative respect, relative equality, much of this regret of the United States, which was telling, you know, French troops do not treat them as equals because when they come back, they're going to expect, you know, they're going to expect that. But yeah, so I think that it brought a heightened militancy.

But of course, even in the World War One moment, with this idea of the new Negro, it was the same type of ideology, right? Because World War I showed that, or a really challenges idea that Europeans were the most civilized because they're in gate, they're killing each other and engaging in this sort of barbaric, very brutal war. And so black people, for a number of reasons, one of which was the Great Migration, one of which was sort of inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution, but they were asserting this sort of new Negro identity

that was a more militant Negro. So when the red summer of 1919 happened, which was months and months and months of race riots, black people were more willing and able to defend themselves, not least because some of these black folks had come back from the army or from the military with different types of arms training. They were just much more willing to defend themselves by any means necessary.

And so this was a sort of earlier iteration of what really of the double v campaign victory at home, victory abroad that you're referring to happening during World War II. Another thing that comes up too, I'm just thinking how there's really nothing that the ruling class hates more than when recent class consciousness are combined in the same analysis, right? Like a movement or an individual, for example, MLK again, right? Like it was when he began to really combine his analysis of racism and political equality with economic and class analysis more explicitly, right? Like he was assassinated

right after he joined in and showed solidarity with the striking sanitation workers and Memphis. That was the most dangerous thing that he could do. And Fred Hampton too, like with his rainbow coalition, and not only was he trying to break down barriers between different subaltern racialized groups, but also, of course, being a communist was centering class analysis and class consciousness. So yeah, that's just something that comes up for me, is how much the ruling class abhorres

when these racialized hierarchies are situated within a class analysis. And when you start breaking down those artificially manufactured racialized barriers, that's a big problem for the capitalist class because, you know, that whole divide and conquer strategy then begins to lose its efficacy. Yeah, so I think it's when a race consciousness comes together

with a class consciousness, but also anti-imperialism in an internationalist orientation. So if you look at the Black Panther Party, for example, they were decimated by the US government because they had a race analysis, a class analysis, as well as they were anti-imperialists. So they were looking to Cuba and to Vietnam and to Algeria and other places to build actual connections. And we see this with somebody like Paul Robeson and WAB DeBoys, both of whose passports were canceled in the 1950s because they were making all of these connections between worker exploitation, racial exploitation, and colonialism.

And so, yeah, the linking up of those things are extremely dangerous. We even see it to a certain, it's very ubiquitous throughout history, but even with your example of Martin Luther King, when he started critiquing the war alongside doing organizing of workers, alongside his call to dismantle Jim Crow. He had defied the boundaries of this sort of bourgeois liberalism that had often sort of shaped the civil rights movement and he he

was moving into sort of radical territory, right? He was moving beyond rights and recognition and beginning to focus on redistribution and what that entails is you know, it into these forms of exploitation and Periodism that really in peril like the whole world, right? Right So it's definitely Apparent right that the the red scare and the black scares are undoubtedly still with us today. All you have to do is really look at, for example, the reaction to the propalistinian sentiment, even in the most muted and milktost sense, right? It's an echo of the black and red scares and the mass hysteria around Palestinian resistance, too, right? And as a second-generation Iranian immigrant, I noticed vividly the echoes of the post-911, you know, lead up to the Iraq war, just, you know, the racism and the anti-radical frenzy, wimped up by these very same forces. And so, you know,

these forces are still with us today. It's this continuation of the Red Square and the manufactured fear of those who look a little bit different. Now, I'm wondering if you have any further comments maybe about how the black scare and red scares are continuing to play out today. And maybe, you know, has there been any progress in fighting against these ideologies? Well, what's really important to note is that the anti-terrorism apparatus builds upon the anti-communist state apparatus. There's really a seamless transition, right? So especially before the formal end to the Cold War, but certainly after, there really

is a shift from the figure of the communists to the figure of the terrorists, but a lot of the discourse is the same. And a lot of the ways of identifying belonging and unbelonging, danger, subversion, is basically taking a playbook from anti-communism, right? And the hard work that it took to build this idea of a particular way of being American and of being patriotic and of being loyal, that that then gets re-employed in the context of the rise of anti-Arab, anti-Islamic

and quote unquote anti-terrorist discourse policy and practice. And so I think that that's important to note. But also, you know, what we're seeing today, especially with, you know, the the disciplining of folks who are advocating Palestinian liberation, it's the same type of discourse for a person who were advocating for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, or who had any type of internationalist perspective. It's this idea that the U.S. has the final say on what is democratic, who has the right to struggle and by what means, what constitutes prosperity, what is legitimate. And if you defy those things, then your right right to free speech to freedom of assembly, the freedom of association is abrogated, like those things on apply to you. And what's also really important about what else I talk about in the book is the importance

of war, right, that the US is a war driven society. And what's important about the US being a war driven society is that in times of war or in times of crisis, the US legitimates the curtailment of rights and liberties. And so right now we see a legitimation of the curtailment of rights and liberties because of this war situation, right? So Israel has the right to defend itself. Therefore anybody who pushes back against that, a US ally, anybody who contravenes that,

who points to genocide or apartheid or the humanization, they become enemies of the state and they don't deserve to even be able to make a living, right? You don't deserve to have a job, you don't deserve to have any platform, you don't deserve to be part of institutions like the university, and it becomes legitimized because of times of quote unquote crisis. And so that is like one takeaway from, I think, black scare, red scare is that this is why people are

they're saying it's like the new McCarthyism. Now I'll push back against that a bit because a part of what I've tried to outline here is that these dynamics are not reducible to McCarthyism. And McCarthyism is just one iteration of this broader Anti-communist governance, right? That has not ended just because the Cold War has ended and so Part of the reason why people are called are are drawing on McCarthyism is because they see that You know

ostensibly in the land of the free you don't have freedom you can't just say whatever you want you can't advocate for free, you don't have freedom, you can't just say whatever you want, you can't advocate for oppressed people without running a fowl of the ruling class. And it's not only that you can't do those things, that you will be disciplined for doing those things. And so I really think that the logic, the ethos, the other ring of the moment that I look at at my book from, you know, World War I once thought I look early cold war is very legible today and in fact what I write about in The epilogue is the indictment of the African people socialist party who were indicted under the foreign agents registration act for ostensibly being agents of Russia and

This is important because this is a sort of black socialist organization that very few people know about. And I think I don't think it's happenstance that it is a black socialist organization that has been accused of, you know, being under the thumb of Russia because they're advocating for things like black equality because they, again, charged the United States with genocide and they're considered to be spreading, you know, Russian propaganda because they advocate for multi polarity. And so that's really kind of textbook, like it's very, very reminiscent of the US government's targeting of like the Civil Rights Congress or the Council on African Affairs or these

other Black or International organizations who are making similar types of arguments. And so, also during the 2020 uprising after the murder of George Ford and Breonna Taylor, we heard a lot of this discourse about like outside agitators, right? They were trying to link some of these protests to like China. And but what we saw about with outside agitation

is that it was people like Kyle Rittenhouse, these were the outside agitators. It was the white supremacists who were coming from far and wide to terrorize people, to harass people, and yet it's when black people or interracial people, like our interracial group asserts particular rights, their rights of protest, right, the right to rise up, that it becomes about outside agitation and some type of form manipulation to de-legitimize what is right to struggle. Yeah, I think we definitely see that dynamic playing out in, for example, the StopCop City movement in Atlanta. When we spoke with Kiana Jones and Matthew Johnson and March about the Stop-cop city movement. They were talking about how during the mass arrests that were happening, specifically during

one of the flare-ups in resistance around that time. Now, APD was actually publicizing the arrests of individuals who weren't from Atlanta or Georgia, like focusing on making public the arrests of people who had traveled from outside of the state in solidarity. And you know that this was a conscious attempt to paint the movement as being led by outside agitators. But yeah, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how this is playing out in the Stop Cop City movement, specifically.

Yeah, and I think that's really important that it's in Atlanta, which is a predominantly black city. And when you have a place like Atlanta, which is extraordinarily polarized by class, it's also very racially segregated. But the idea that you would push back against a cop training facility in the context of a black city where it's understood that black people need to be controlled, they need to be surveilled, they need to be police, it becomes extraordinarily problematic, right? It is too close to asserting a type of black self-determination, that is to say that black people deserve a life without being treated like an occupied force. And then it's also an important space because of Gilly, which is the training of Georgia police departments by the IDF, right?

And so there's a way that at Lansopy is an important sort of militarized space and any push back against further militarization is seen as a challenge to U.S. authority. And it's really, it's not lost on me that that is precisely where Angelo Herndon was charged with insurrection. As what prior to Angelo Herndon, there was an insuracial group, they're called the Atlanta Six. They also were charged with insurrection for organizing an insuracial protest, right? And so, and the Stoppops City movement is very much interracial in a black city that is trying to assert a particular type of a form of living that challenges like the authority of the state to have them

monopoly on violence and so and also so there's these trials of the Communist Party that started in 1948 and these are really conspiracy trials. So there's a massive number of, between sort of 1948 and like 1958, there's over 150 liter of the Communist Party who are indicted, tried, many of whom are in prison,

some of whom are deported, but these are largely conspiracy trials, right? They're charged with overthrowing the government by force or violence, and they're primarily using readings and in you window and writing's not actual actions to indict these folks. And that's not unlike the use of Rico because the racketeering influence of corrupt organization is about conspiracy, right? If you get one person that anybody else who's associated with that entity is also guilty. So again, it's the same types of laws instead of applied to these large anti-communist trials,

which apply even to the indictment of the industrial workers of the world. It's this idea that if there's even one guilty radical, then everybody's guilty. You don't really have to have due process. you don't really have to have due process. You don't really have to have sufficient evidence. The ideology is enough. The challenge to the state is enough. And I think that we're seeing a resurgence of that type of logic and group condemnation coming back

in the country of the United States because the US is of dying imperial power. And instead of eradicating all the social ills that are galvanizing people, the US is doubling down on militarism, right? It's doubling down on funding police. It's doubling down on violence because the death dealing is unsustainable. So there's just a lot of resonances with what's happening now, and the forms of activism that are being disciplined now,

and some of the things that I cover within BlackScare RedScare. Yeah, absolutely. You open the book's epilogue with the line, BlackScare RedScare is a history of the present. And you've also, you've written that ClassWord doesn't have to be one-sided. An organized, radical working class counteroffensive is not only possible, but absolutely vital.

And I'm wondering, you know, just to close out today, if you have any final thoughts and anything that you want to sort of share that maybe I didn't ask or that you wanted to bring up. But also, if you want to like point folks in any specific direction or maybe talk about how we can begin to sort of rise above the fear mongering and the propaganda and what Michael Perente has referred to as the invention of reality when it comes to shaping the way that we think around the black

scare and the red scare. And yeah, any final thoughts or any directions that you'd like to point folks in who want to maybe begin working towards building an organized party or an organized movement that can begin to actually take part in the class war in an effective way. Yeah, I mean I think the first thing is like joining a movement organization. Joining an organization is so discouraged, like by the online left for reasons, right? For some reasons that may or may not be valid, but you have to join an organization.

The way that people like Paul Robison and WB DeBoys and Claudia Jones and Luis Thompson Patterson and others that I cover in the book were able to keep going was that they were in organizations, they were part of collectives, and they were dedicated to concrete objectives, right? That solidarity requires concrete objectives, it requires collective responsibility,

it requires collective study. And so engaging in political education is what will allow us to be able to cut through the propaganda by the mainstream media who just tought the line of the U.S. State Department to be able to have, you know, discernment between what we're told to believe and what are the forms of knowledge that are actually going to lead us towards sort of liberation and equality. So I think joining an organization is absolutely vital. Go outside. Like I understand we're still the pandemic is still here, right? COVID is still a thing, but we have at some point

we have to get off of the internet to the best of our ability. I understand, you know, everybody, you know, I don't mean to be ableist in that way, but I do think there's a way that we need to get used to coming together and not just at this inflection point. So we need to come together in real life and do the real hard work of sustained building, right? Mobilization, organization are at the same thing. And you know, as, you know, Jody D. Nigh edited this book, Organized Fight, When Black Comics Women's Political Writing. And part of what we emphasize is that we have to believe that we will win, right? We can't succumb to this pessimism and annihilism that can render us inert. Like we have to understand that even with all of surveillance and harassment and repression and economic devastation, environmental degradation, even in the context of all of this,

like we will win, we can win, but that requires organization and patience and sort of a long view of what is to be done. And so yeah, I just wanna end there that, if we don't believe we'll win, then that can sort of absolve us or sort of low us to think that we don't have to fight. But you know, the truth is on the side of the oppressed, so don't give up. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Cherie Spurden-Stelly, associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University, a fellow at the Charles Warren Center

for Studies in American History at Harvard University, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace, and author of BlackScare, RedScare, theorizing capitalist racism in the United States, published by the University of Chicago Press. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode's cover art, and to Rights of Spring for the intermission music. Upstream Thee Music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love.

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