Charisse Burden-Stelly, "Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Nov 17, 2023

Charisse Burden-Stelly, researcher and author specializing in theorizing capitalist racism in the United States, discusses the conjoined nature of the Black Scare and Red Scare in the early 20th century. She explores how US capitalist racist society and Wall Street imperialism intertwine to maintain racial and economic order. The podcast also examines the intersection of black radicalism and state repression, and explores the parallels between the South African apartheid government and the American state in their fear of African Americans.

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INSIGHT

Black Scare As Existential Threat

The Black Scare framed Black demands for equality as existential threats to whiteness and US stability.
It linked Black agitation to foreign enemies by portraying Black liberation as anti-American propaganda.

INSIGHT

How The Red Scare Operated

The Red Scare criminalized anti-capitalist ideas by equating them with communist infiltration and subversion.
Redbaiting deprived accused people of jobs, free speech, and due process through surveillance and blacklisting.

INSIGHT

Blackness As Structural Location

Blackness functions as a structural location combining economic, legal, and discursive oppression not reducible to class alone.
Black women exemplify super-exploitation through low-paid domestic and agricultural labor and unpaid reproductive work.

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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. In Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (U Chicago Press, 2023), Charisse Burden-Stelly 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—Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She 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. Burden-Stelly 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, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

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