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

A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the U.S. 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 for 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. She shows that antiradical repression is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.

Beginning in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces the long history of these intertwined phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism: the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black—interchangeable threats.

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the U.S. and its governance while also shining a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes how the Black Scare / Red Scare continues to reverberate in the suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from multiple disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.