8 . 7. 2021, originally published on Counterpunch+, July 5, 2021
Antiracism as Thoughtcrime
The sloppy fascist Donald Trump may no longer reside in the White House but he’s back on the hate rally campaign trail selling his big Hitlerian Stolen Election Lie. Meanwhile, Trumpist white nationalism is booming in the “red states,” where Amerikaner[1] Republicans hold the reins.
One of many signs of this right-wing disease’s persistent, arguably growing hold is the recent explosion of state legislation targeting critical race theory (CRT). As of June 29, Education Week reports,“26 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism…Nine states have enacted these bans, either through legislation or other avenues.”
It’s not just a southern thing. A bill signed by Iowa’s white-supremacist governor “Killer” Kim Reynolds in mid-June makes it a crime to teach the following concepts in the state’s public educational institutions from kindergarten through PhD:
+ “That the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”
+ “That any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”
+ “That meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.”
The Iowa bill contains no explicit reference to CRT, but it didn’t need to. Frau Reynolds made sure to denounce the CRT as “discriminatory indoctrination” in her signing statement.
The Sin of Historical and Sociological Truth-Telling
What is CRT? It’s a four decades-old academic analysis holding that racism is a social, legal, and political construct, and that it is “not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies….A good example,” Education Week notes, “is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.”
Another example is the disparate targeting of Black Americans in the War on Drugs, which has saddled millions of those Americans with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record (law professor Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow”) on top of disfiguring prison histories and pre-existing deep poverty.
At the risk of extreme understatement, another example is the long pre-Civil War U.S. legal and political definition of African Americans as less than fully human and as therefore legitimately subject to ruthless torture and exploitation under the vicious regime of Black chattel slavery, which provided the core underpinning of the United States’ rise to world economic importance in the 19th Century.
The list of examples past (e.g., the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that sanctified Jim Crow segregation for 56 years) and present (e.g., racially disparate mass arrest and incarceration and the racist voter suppression policies and practices that prevail and are being ramped up across many “red states”) are voluminous.
CRT advances an elementarily accurate description of lived social and historical racial reality in the U.S.. It offers critical context for persistent American race apartheid and related racial inequality so extreme that the median Black household’s net worth equals less than 10 cents on the median white household net worth dollar.
“How Fascism Works”: Ten Out of Ten
What’s the attack on CRT – really on telling the truth about past and ongoing white supremacism and institutional racism in the United States – all about?
It’s about fascism, to be perfectly frank – no small matter.
The right-wing war on CRT and anti-racist thought in general is a big deal.
In what follows, I discuss how the anti-CTR jihad matches each of the ten core ideational components of the fascist political playbook detailed in Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley’s excellent, widely read book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.
1. “The Mythic Past.” Fascists are attached to a mythologized, supposedly glorious national past they wish to reinvigorate against alleged backstabbing enemies and in the name of racial, ethnic, and/or cultural purity. Those who tell the truth about North American slavery, Native American genocide, and Jim Crow oppression show that the rising American republic and Empire was never “great” and virtuous but was instead a horrific monument to barbarous white- nationalist racial oppression. They show that the United States’ climb to wealth and power rested on the backs and bones of slaughtered Indigenous people and ruthlessly exploited slaves and sharecroppers. For 21st Century Amerikaners, this disgraceful history – the telling of which became newly legitimized by the Civil Rights and Black and Indian Power rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s – must be re-deleted and whitewashed all over again.
2. “Propaganda.” The assault on CRT (really on elementary truth-telling about deeply understood racism past and present) has been fueled by the right-wing propaganda machine at FOX News, Breitbart, OANN, right-wing talk radio and online. Amerikaner citizens and legislators who would never learn on their own about an academic concept like CRT are suddenly muttering bitter curses against it because the white-nationalist propaganda mill has planted it in their racially paranoid minds.
“Political propaganda,” Stanley writes in How Fascism Works, “uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends.” Suppression of truth and facts become the “defense of history” (and Confederate statutes) and white supremacy is mandated in the ironic name of anti-racism.
3. “Anti-intellectual.” Fascists fear and hate intellectuals and academics as well as racial and ethnic minorities, The fascist war on CRT is a far-right two-fer. Giving them seemingly populist, anti-establishment cover by portraying CRT as a big scary and evil concoction of the professional, university, and managerial elite, it lets Amerikaners combine their assault on racial reality with a shot at “fancy pants” liberal-radical university folks. On top of the swipe at nonwhite masses, fascists also get to metaphorically punch professors in the nose by outlawing university-hatched CRT.
4. “Unreality.” Fascist politics and propaganda involve a relentless assault on material, social, and historical reality. “That the United States of America and its states are fundamentally and systemically racist” (a concept now illegal to teach in public education in the state of Iowa, which had the nation’s highest per-capita rate of Union Army enlistment during the Civil War) is a simple, highly documented truth on par with “two plus two equals four.” Not wanting to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account” of their white skin privilege, Amerikaners are more comfortable with two plus two equaling five when it comes to race. They are wired to reflexively believe some influential racist-fascist asshole like Donald Trump when he absurdly says that whites are just as victimized by police violence as Black people in the U.S. – or that the slaveowners’ Confederate Flag is a cherished part of our shared national heritage. Black is White, Big Brother says. When there are no true facts, there can’t be any serious debate. Only the word of the Great Leader counts, and conspiracy theories metastasize.
5. “Hierarchy.” CRT says that racism is a social and political construct and a set of social structural and institutional arrangements that keep Black people at the bottom of the nation’s steep social hierarchies. Fascists are Social Darwinists who view inequality as the outcome of supposed natural differences that reflect the genetic and cultural superiority of those above (and of all members of the super race/group) and the natural and cultural inferiority of those below. Honest, reality-based historical and social-scientific discussion of white supremacism and structural and institutional racism undermines the Social Darwinian narrative and so must be stamped out by white supremacists like Governor Reynolds and her fellow members of the Amerikaner Iowa Republifascist Party (AIRP).
6. “Victimhood.” As part of its racialized and Orwellian inversion of reality and truth, fascism posits the dominant racial (and/or ethnic and/or cultural) group as the real victim of racial injustice. Amerikaners buy into the preposterous notion that it’s whites, not Blacks, LatinX people, and Native Americans who are the objects of the most discrimination in the U.S. today. The notion of a big bad professional and managerial class using evil academic CRT to let supposedly inferior and undeserving people of color “cut in line” ahead of purportedly virtuous, superior, and hard-working heartland whites is part of the fascist victimhood narrative. So is the childish notion that telling the truth about past and ongoing white systemic racism makes white people “feel bad” (uncomfortable, anxious, guilty, and anguished, to use the language of the Iowa bill). In the white-nationalist mindset epitomized by the anti-CRT legislation and movement, a teacher victimizes her white students by teaching the real history of the Black and Native American experiences in British colonial North America and the United States.
7. “Law and Order.” By noting and documenting how mass arrest, incarceration, supervision, and criminal branding by the U.S. police state oppresses Black and other nonwhite Americans, critical race theoreticians and others who tell basic truths about systemic racism challenge the moral legitimacy of contemporary American “law and order.” They encourage protest of the racist, classist, and sexist “law and order” regime, as during the remarkable George Floyd Rebellion of 2020. This is anathema to “red state” Amerikaner legislators, who are passing laws criminalizing protest along with racist voter suppression bills and anti-CRT measures. In Republifascist doctrine, law and order is defined as enforcing the “natural superiority” of the white master race and brutally enforcing the “inferiority” of the “other.” This definition is dashed by any modestly objective assessment of U.S. history through the lens of its roots in systemic white supremacy and genocide.
8. “Sexual Anxiety.” American racism (the honest discussion of which is considered a thoughtcrime by Amerikaner state legislators) has always been connected to fear of sexual miscegenation (genetic dilution of racial and ethnic purity). Thousands of Black men were lynched on false charges of sexually assaulting white women during the long Jim Crow era. It should be noted that the recently passed Iowa bill quoted above makes it a crime also for public educators to (accurately) portray Iowa and the US as fundamentally and systemically sexist. Other state anti-CRT bills contain similar language on gender.
9. Anti-Urban (“Sodom and Gomorrah”). A critical component of fascist politics channels folksy and rustic fear and loathing of cities, seen as the swarthy and impure sites of nefarious race mixing, cosmopolitan liberalism and radicalism, sexual license, criminality, and other threats to proper social order. Cities are seen as the sites of “race mixing defiling the once pure Volk” (Jason Stanley). The assault on CRT (really on honest discussion of racism, deeply understood) is concerned with disproportionately nonwhite cities, homes to urban school systems with largely nonwhite students from ghettoized communities who know that American white systemic racism is a very real thing. Blue cities and campus towns (including many inside “red states” like Iowa City, Iowa, Lincoln, Nebraska, and Lawrence, Kansas) are also home to largely white professional and managerial elites who Republifascists accuse of stabbing the once glorious Nation in the back by letting supposedly dissolute and criminal non-whites “cut ahead” of purportedly virtuous and hard-working heartland whites (“real Americans”).
10. “Arbeit Macht Frie”/“Work Makes You Free” (this slogan was emblazoned on the gates to Auschwitz). This is Professor Stanley’s way of characterizing the fascist notion that the people at the bottom of society’s hierarchies are lazy and dissolute while those higher up have worked hard and meritoriously for their money and position. Honest, reality-based discussion of American history challenges this narrative, showing how Black slaves’ super-exploited sunup-to-sundown labor provided the basis for the nation’s rise to power but most definitely not for Black freedom. Affluent white young adults and older professionals at the nation’s leading colleges, universities, corporations, and financial institutions owe their positions less to hard and supposedly meritorious work than to inherited class-race privilege. The same is even more true of the nation’s very disproportionately white and richly parasitic ruling capitalist class. The dissolute cheat and rapist Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and owed his rise to his (virulently racist) white father’s wealth, as is commonly the case among rich white Americans.
The Iowa bill designates the questioning of meritocracy and the work ethic as a reverse-racist and anti-male thoughtcrtime. This is absurd. Critical race theorists and other critics of American racism and sexism aren’t against merit or hard work. They do not embrace or defend laziness, unfair advantage, and cheating. What’s really behind the Iowa measure’s prohibition against teaching “that meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist” is the fact that critical race theorists and other smart anti-racists (and anti-capitalists) see through the self-serving nonsense and unreality involved in accusing those at the bottom of sloth and misconduct while fallaciously claiming that those at the top owe their affluence and status to superior hard work and virtue.
The Anti-CRT and Broader Amerikaner Movement
In Republifascist Iowa[2] and other “red” states, the anti-CRT bill is part of a bigger Amerikaner legislative blitzkrieg that includes measures deepening the criminalization of protest, suppressing the voting rights of nonwhites, slashing unemployment benefits and pandemic protections for the disproportionately nonwhite victims of joblessness and COVID-19, attacking abortion rights, easing firearm access, and claiming to invalidate federal gun laws and regulations.
Not content merely to advance legislation, Republikaners have mobilized a mass movement against CRT (really against honest discussion of racial oppression in the U.S.) through fascist media and organizations like “Turning Point.” The white nationalist propaganda and policy war on racial truth is only going to get uglier when the fall semester begins. Much of the legislation is being enacted while school is mainly in recess.
Those on “the left” who dismiss liberal and Left concerns about rising Amerikaner fascism tend to live in affluent blue metropolitan bubbles. They pay little attention to and have little direct knowledge of what’s happening in the flyover states that are so absurdly and lethally overrepresented in the U.S. Constitutional order, framed by and for aristo-republican slaveholders and merchant capitalists for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare. They have little if any contact with the many hate-filled Amerikaner Trumpazoids who reside in metropolitan blue zones, especially in white suburban areas undergoing dreaded “demographic change.” They need to get out more. The fascist experiments underway in red states are meant to become a broader trend sweeping the nation in coming years. Continuing left and liberal denial and dismissal of the American neofascist menace, amazingly persistent in the wake of January 6th, can only deepen the descent into white nationalist tribal madness.
Notes
- As far as I am aware, I am the first writer to use the term “Amerikaner” in left political discourse. It is a play on the name of the white Dutch-Anglo minority that imposed a savage regime of racial apartheid and white minority rule on South Africa during the 19th and 20th Centuries. Like the Afrikaners, I maintain, the U.S. hard right Trump base and white nationalist movement is heir to an earlier history of genocidal and imperialist white un-“settlement.” It is opposed to majority rule democracy and committed to the imposition of racial and ethnic separatism/apartheid, inequality, and disenfranchisement, White fears of coming white minority demographic status in the increasingly non-white United States are one aspect of the parallel, reflected in the adoption of the term by certain parts of the nation’s fascistic alt-right.
- Iowa is home after all to the demented former long-term Congressman Steve King, who praised the Dutch white nationalist Geert Wilders as follows in March of 2017: “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”