A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government’s anti-communist repression.
 
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, 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.

Charisse Burden-Stelly is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the coauthor of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History and the coeditor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, a collection of essays by Percy C. Hintzen.

Introduction

Part I. Black Scare / Red Scare Foundation: Political Economy and the Threat of Radical Blackness
1. Theorizing US Capitalist Racist Society
2. The Black Scare, the Red Scare, and the Threat of Radical Blackness
3. Genres of Radical Blackness
4. The Negro Question as a National Question, the Structural Location of Blackness, and the Problem of Black Self-Determination
5. Wall Street Imperialism and Expropriation Abroad
6. War, Wall Street Imperialism, (Inter-)National Accumulation

Part II. Black Scare / Red Scare Codification: Governance and Legitimating Architecture
7. Theorizing Anticommunism as a Mode of Governance
8. Loyalty, Criminality, and “Clear and Present Danger”: The Anticommunist Governance of the Executive and Judicial Branches
9. Sedition, Subversion, and National Security: The Anticommunist Governance of the Legislative Branch
10. The Countersubversive Political Tradition and the Threat of US Fascism
11. True Americanism: The Legitimating Architecture of US Capitalist Racist Society

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index