In a recent Saturday Night Live episode, when asked about Minneapolis, one of the white hosts intones: “Well, the first word that comes to mind is unprecedented. You’ve got federal officers roaming the streets just pulling people out of their cars based on how they look. This just doesn’t happen in America.” The joke is, of course, that “this” has been happening forever, but to Black people in America. Now that it is happening to others, and particularly now that white protesters are being killed in the streets, it is suddenly a national emergency.
In his 1955 work Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician, argues that fascism was the result of bringing to bear on domestic populations the tactics European countries used on their colonial subjects in Africa. This is what has been called in the literature the “imperial boomerang thesis”. As many have been pointing out on social media and elsewhere, if we think of the US Black American population as an internally colonized population, then you can see what is happening on the streets of Minneapolis as a manifestation of the imperial boomerang thesis.
It is an old point in the literature on fascism that if you allow fascism somewhere – in Guantánamo Bay, in Israel, on the streets of American cities – it will soon leak out everywhere. As Ida B Wells noted in her 1892 book Southern Horrors: “They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime … concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime.”
Some commentators have taken the fact that the violence we are seeing is familiar in the US – arbitrary killings by legal authorities – to draw the conclusion that what we are seeing is not fascism, but just America as it always has been. But fascism is characteristically arbitrary legal practices applied outside of what had been a standard exception – in the case of the United States, that would be generalizing the arbitrary violence directed at Black populations to the population as a whole. Fascism feeds off exceptions to equal personhood, adopting practices honed on those considered lesser-than to apply to the regime’s political opponents. America has always been structured on exceptions to equal personhood. These exceptions laid the groundwork for the descent of the US into full-blown fascism.
We can also not maintain that the situation is merely the expansion of America’s fascist practices directed against non-white populations to the population at large. Fascism brings with it an intensification of the campaign against the exceptions, since it rips off the facade of pretense.
Right now, the official state policy of the US government is white supremacy. We are in the phase of autocracy where the government is arresting journalists. And of course, the government is beginning this phase with publicly arresting Black journalists. The regime has publicly targeted Black people in positions of power, as well as sectors that employ large numbers of Black women. And of course, longstanding US targeting of non-white immigrants has escalated, with the regime spending billions to build a vast system of concentration camps.
The terror campaign against Somali immigrants in Minneapolis and (it looks like) a coming pogrom against Haitian immigrants in Ohio will be opportunities to showcase the regime’s capacity to impose terror. Under fascism, everything becomes dramatically worse for everyone – including the working-class white families whose access to healthcare and other basic human rights are dramatically rolled back to pad the pockets of the dictator and his billionaire friends.
Fascism harshly targets LGBTQ+ acceptance. Again, this works in steps. The campaign against trans acceptance was promoted in large part by mainstream media. But it was taken up as a central plank of the Trump campaign, and we can expect this “exception” to tolerance to be the springboard of a more widespread attack against the American LGBTQ+ community.
We are seeing classical theories of fascism unfold in real time, as exceptions to liberal ideals are used as launchpads for a full-scale assault on the ideals themselves. This should also serve as a vindication of another analysis – the response to fascism must include the dismantling of the pre-existing structures that enabled and justified its rise.
In other words, we cannot put the fires out one by one – the response to American fascism must necessarily involve addressing America’s longstanding legal violence directed against its Black population, chiefly in the form of mass incarceration (nine US states have higher incarceration rates than every country in the world except El Salvador; the US state with the lowest incarceration rate still has an incarceration rate three times as high as Canada). And the most obvious immediate step to dismantle the pre-existing structure that brought us to this moment is to abolish ICE, and indeed the entire Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The DHS was founded in the wake of the terrorist attack on 9/11. It immediately began infringing on the civil rights of Muslim Americans. Any would-be autocrat with a modicum of imagination would recognize it as an ideal institution to employ against the civil rights of all Americans. The DHS must be abolished. Any politician who argues otherwise is complicit in the rise of American fascism.
Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd chair of American studies at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future
