Fascism
No. 5 | 2021
Jean-Michel Basquiat – Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), 1983. Photograph: Allison Chipak/Collection of Nina Clemente, New York
Fascism as Diversion
I live in Portland. I moved here because I wanted to live among people committed to progressive values—thoughtful activism, environmental responsibility, and the idea of a healthy, connected community.
And still, racism is pervasive here.
Portland’s history of gentrification and rezoning is long and damaging. Oregon itself was founded on Black exclusion laws and white supremacy. There is no shortage of reporting on the Portland Police Bureau’s repeated and organized acts of unwarranted violence against Black people. None of this is incidental, and none of it is new.
By now, you know that white and Black Portlanders have come together—in Portland fashion—in the spirit of mostly peaceful protest and free speech, to acknowledge and challenge these realities. You also know that protesters have been tear-gassed, beaten, shot with impact munitions, detained without cause, and terrorized by our own federal government.
That, now, is the story traveling internationally. Images of Trump, authoritarianism, and state violence circulate widely. What gets less attention, once again, are Black lives themselves.
So pause. Breathe. Remember.
Portlanders are protesting because Black lives matter. Downtown fills night after night with chants for Black lives, for Breonna Taylor, for George Floyd. Black activists like E.D. Mondaine, along with community members such as Michael Richardson, Kinsey Smyth, and Devin Boss, speak about systemic racism and what it means to live in a country where freedom is conditional—where one can feel like a prisoner of war in one’s own home.
I don’t know what white people will do next. I hope we don’t lose our sense of purpose under pressure. I hope we don’t forget why people took to the streets in the first place.
Rather than giving in to the urge to predict or control what comes next, I’m choosing uncertainty. It’s a difficult choice, but a necessary one.
Correspondence
That choice has led me back to the public correspondence between Angela Davis and James Baldwin from 1970–71. Baldwin wrote to Davis while she was incarcerated, held illegally for over a year as a political prisoner. Davis responded publicly, signifying his letter in return. Their exchange is intimate, rigorous, and unsparing, tracing the deep entanglement of fascism and racism with a clarity that still feels urgent.
Reading them now is a reminder: none of this is disconnected. And none of it is accidental.
An open letter to my sister, Ms. Angela Davis. From James Baldwin
Dear Sister:
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
November 19, 1970
An Open Letter from the Marin County Jail in May 1971, by Angela Y. Davis
In resisting, we have sometimes been compelled to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our oppression. But even when containing our resistance within the orbit of legality, we have been labeled criminals and have been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus.
Official assertions that meaningful dissent is always welcome provided it falls within the boundaries of legality are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation to acquiesce in oppression.
The government is not hesitating to utilize an entire network of fascist tactics. The sharp edge of political repression, cutting through the heightened militancy of the masses, and bringing growing numbers of activists behind prison walls,
One of the fundamental historical lessons to be learned from past failures to prevent the rise of fascism is the decisive and indispensable character of the fight against fascism in its incipient phases…Although the most unbridled expressions of the fascist menace are still tied to the racist domination, it lurks under the surface wherever there is potential resistance...The masses of people in this country have a real, direct and material stake in the struggle against all dimensions of racism.
No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!
Marin County Jail, May, 1971
The letters are beautiful. They’re chilling, though, in their evocation of today’s Portland. See for yourself.
More soon.
So. Much. Love.
Cara
