We can't be afraid to name fascism when we see it

Kelley teaching W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction

New Yorker staff writer Vincent Cunningham interviewed UCLA historian Robin D. G. Kelley for the L.A. Times about history and the current moment. What does historical inquiry mean to a Black man who views himself as, of necessity, a participant in, as well as a describer of, the permanent struggle for justice and freedom? Here is some of that conversation.

VC: What do you view as your role as an intellectual? ... how do you make sure that what you’re describing is not only scrupulously true but also feeds into a politics that helps us both survive in the present and get somewhere more free in the future? 

RDGK: That’s a great question. I feel like it’s not mandatory but it’s really important for me to be engaged in these movements, to make no pretense about some kind of dispassionate, detached objectivity. I think that we need to practice something that’s even better than objectivity. And that is, as you know, critique. Critique, to me, is better than objectivity. Objectivity is a false stance. I’m not neutral. I’ve never been neutral. I write about struggles and social movements because I actually don’t think the world is right and something needs to change. 

As a historian, as a writer, I’ve got to try to be as critical as possible. I’m always trying to be truthful. As I write and produce this work, I learn things that we didn’t see before, but then, the work also reveals things that I failed to understand. And so to me, it’s always a process....

• • •

VC: You’ve said that in some ways the Black radical tradition comes together at “the crossroads where Black revolt and fascism meet.” What does fascism have to do with our moment, and what resources do we have to fight it?

RDGK: I would say — following the argument that [Afro-Caribbean nationalist] Aimé Césaire made in 1950, and that [exile from Nazism political philosopher] Hannah Arendt made after that — that the roots of fascism are in colonial domination. 

Fascism is the power of the state, through coercion and through nationalism, to mark certain people through brutal suppression of rights, especially using emergency powers. It’s the idea that we’re in a state of war and that state of war is justification for abrogating any kind of civil liberties. In some ways, that’s what colonialism is. 

VC: The constant state of war. 

RDGK: For certain people, America has been fascist all along, and it just depends on what side you’re on. The vast majority of people can’t see fascism in a democracy where they can vote, and where they can walk freely. But for some of us, for undocumented people, for Black people, brown people, for Indigenous peoples especially, who’ve been put in concentration camps — all these fascist practices have existed in the United States from the get-go, from the beginning. What we see is fascism ebbing and flowing. 

The [police and prison] abolitionist movements that erupted in 2020 are the movements that are dead set on ending fascism once and for all. “Fascism” is a word that we can’t be afraid of. I can’t say everything is fascist, but we can’t be afraid of recognizing the fascist elements that have been foundational to this country. ...

We live in interesting times. Seventy-seven years after the "democratic" combatants -- the U.S., the U.K., and Canada -- invaded Europe to wipe out Nazi fascism, we have Republican legislators passing laws to legalize driving into groups of protesters. It's not hard to imagine that such laws are most likely to immunize road ragers who hit people who aren't white. Unhappily, we are likely to find out.

Those of us who have enjoyed comfortable lives didn't think that the D-Day generation's struggle would return, at home. But in a new guise -- from the MAGA swamp of the Republican Party -- it has.