Charisse Burden-Stelly. Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States

Excerpt

Burden-Stelly is a passionate advocate for what can be considered the “Black Radical Left” and Black Marxist thought. Her latest offering encapsulates the spirit of resistance to racialized capitalism that feared Black Nationalism, along with a growing appeal to communist ideology in the early twentieth century. The study primarily covers US capitalism and its concomitant racist parameters. However, there is also an examination of US Imperialism via Wall Street. The author argues forcefully the need to comprehend racialized oppression being inextricably interwoven with the development of capitalism itself. Moreover, the fear of Blackness or rather Black empowerment was in line with the US government’s repression of communist thought and practice. What is commendable about this study is in the manner it engages with Black Nationalist and Black communist or socialist leaders of the era to show the way in which the US government did not care for either. Regardless, for example, that Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) rejected communism and accepted capitalism; or, in turn, how Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) rejected Black Nationalism for a Marxist approach to Black liberation — both perspectives were repressed by US government agencies (pp.176–177). To be sure, men like Garvey and Briggs, had far more in common ideologically than difference as Pan Africanists. Yet, according to Burden-Stelly, the agents of racialized oppression in the US government viewed such Black leaders as threats to existing white economic and cultural hegemony. Burden-Stelly should be congratulated in showing ultimately that whatever path was taken ideologically, if it had a Black viewpoint and focus on liberation, then it was regarded as a menace to mainstream (read white) America. …