The Roots of US Anticommunism can be found in White Racism

The deep roots of anticommunism in the US are integral to white racism. They are not tangential, nor are they coincidental. They are connected in logical flow, one to another.

Anticommunism in the US has less to do with the 1917 Russian Revolution and much more to do with the so-called "freeing of the slaves" after the US Civil War and the white panic this unleashed.

Prof. Gerald Horne recently pointed out how the product of anti-slavery activism leading up to abolition set the groundwork for anticommunism in the US - an anticommunism, I would add, that is the most paranoid and ferocious in the Western world.

Freeing the slaves certainly had a more visceral, ferocious effect on US society than the Bolshevik Revolution.

That a whole white, Southern planter aristocracy lost its capital [African slaves] without compensation haunts the American political psyche to its core, and this haunting pervades both sides of the proverbial chamber, left and right. This is what a Black Bolshevik-style revolution threatens both white left and white right.

This is why the US police state, from the days after the Bolshevik Revolution to the murder of Fred Hampton to the framing of many Black radicals, was particularly paranoid about Black communists. Suspected and actual Black communists were targeted. And they weren't only targeted in the US. 

FOIA records show that after Cuban Communist Party Blas Roca opened the doors of the Cuban Party to Black Cubans in 1940, made anti-racism a priority, and elaborated its own version of the "Black Belt Theory," and Black Cubans joined in droves. The US responded with anxiety. It got more anxious and produced more files on any prominent Black Cuban whom they suspected of joining Cuba's communist party, renamed the Popular Socialist Party. Young Black Cuban singer, Celia Cruz, being an example of this target for her mere association, and possible membership.

In the US, the most popular Black man was also a communist. Paul Robeson. And he had to be the object of a well-orchestrated, prolonged takedown by the state.

But this is also why Black voices - militants and otherwise - have always been corralled by the gatekeepers of the left. "Don't be so angry." "Don't come off too strong." "Cool it." Or a variation of "that's not a working-class issue" or "that's not our issue." I've heard them all firsthand.

Worse, from time immemorial it is a matter of record we keep being asked to set aside our needs for some greater working-class ambition. I argue there is a larger, strategic motive behind this.

The view of the Black man and Black woman in the US is a national view, regardless of political leanings. We were raised with it. It's in our public institutions. It is the white left that does not understand the implications of this on themselves.

So, we have a credible explanation now as to why our white leftist friends, and their formations, groups, marginal political parties continue to fail the Black community - and thereby fail the mission of neither bettering the Black condition in this white settler-colonial state, nor producing a socialist society.

Our white left's fear of a new slave revolt, even if that slave revolt is necessary to bring us the liberation of a socialist society to build, remains a deterrent over a century after the 13th amendment.

Like the US police agencies, these white leftists have an institutional paranoia of Black radicalism. They've acculturated just enough where their propaganda shows the Black faces, they know we must be included in the list of marginalized, oppressed groups, and they will celebrate the voices of Black radicals - who are dead. They must be dead.

This savvy can no longer be allowed to give these people a pass.

Malcolm is quoted, put on memes, and brandished conspicuously today by the white left, but in his life, the white communists lambasted him as "an adventurer." He was far from promoted; he was ridiculed. A Black communist like Harry Haywood, who joined the Communists when his Black Marxist formation, African Blood Brotherhood, merged with them. As soon as the white communists dropped Black interests - this barely lasted a decade - many of those Black ABB communists quit. Haywood stayed in and was eventually expelled for lack of conformity.

These are provocative thoughts, and they are meant to be. As the working class further degrades under capitalism's neoliberal phase leading to fascism, the hubris and kinship ties of many white leftists needs confrontation. They need to reflect. I have as much hope they will as I have in a Democrat changing his/her spots.

But they must change, and its formations must change. I repeat that socialism will only come to the US when it is Black, even though the implied revolution that this demands is as scary to any white leftists as it was to their Southern Confederate kin. This is a problem. But this is the rite of passage communists and socialists will have to undergo if we are to have any hope for the broader working class.

For communism - or socialism, if you will - to take hold and have any success in the broad US society, it must reach the Black population first. Anything short of this is sham socialism and more liberalism.

But for socialism - or communism if you will - to succeed in the Black population a shift equally radical as abolition will have to occur in this country, and this makes even white leftists uneasy.

And this shift will never occur. It is not intended to occur. Neither the left nor right, for specific historical reasons, want this shift to occur, and this fact should make us question the quality of allies we have among the Black radical left.

Prof. Horne's illumination definitely helped open my eyes to a phenomenon I have, for very personal and very political reasons, been wrestling with for over a year. But also, the new flourish of attacks on Black intellectual bodies - and the way these attacks are played out, in the frenzy of an old lynch mob they perform. In this climate, even white leftists who know otherwise how to say the right things and stand on the right stages, join the mob in shutting down Black voices in ways you would never see used against white racists in this country.

The takeaway is white racists aren't a threat to them; Black people who dare to think outside the box are.

Are white leftists a hopeless cause? Well, they cannot be, and I do not believe they have to be. For one, they outnumber the Black as well as the indigenous as well as the Chicano. We need solidarity to begin the urgent steps to stopping, reversing, and building a socialist society on the ashes of this capitalist one.

But there are also ample examples of real race traitors who endured the enmity of their white leftist brethren. John Brown is the easy example of this.

So, as we head towards a juncture where our establishment promises more suffering, not less, in order to "save" the economy, where millions are anticipated to be thrown out of work, joining the already filled pipelines to housing insecurity, homelessness, prison, where it becomes clearer by the hour that this economy worth saving can only be saved when it serves fewer and fewer lucky lottery winners - we need socialism, so white people need to be slapped wake.