The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition Recognized Fascism Didn't Begin in Europe

https://truthout.org/articles/the-black-anti-fascist-tradition-recognized-fascism-didnt-begin-in-europe/

The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition Recognized Fascism Didn’t Begin in Europe

Black anti-fascists have long warned about creeping fascism, from slavery to mass incarceration to ICE terror.

By George Yancy , TRUTHOUT
Published February 21, 2026

Prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility give the Black Power salute on September 10, 1971. “I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and prison abolitionists,” says scholar Jeanelle K. Hope. “The Attica prison uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.”
BETTMANN / CONTRIBUTOR / GETTY IMAGES

Back in 2016, I was asked what I thought about Donald Trump. Even back then, I saw him as an aspiring fascist, and I responded:

Simply put. He is a conduit through which white America expresses its most vile desire for white purity. An apocalyptically dangerous white man who sees himself as the center of the world. That kind of hubris bespeaks realities of genocide.

Trump 2.0 has only confirmed my fears, my dread, and my anger. Make no mistake about it: This administration is unapologetically and shamelessly hellbent on establishing a violent white fascistic state. I know that some are surprised, but the truth of the matter is that the horrible reality of anti-Black fascism is not a new formation. The soul of this country was founded upon white power, white greed, and white violence. So, I am not surprised by the likes of Trump; he is a product of a vicious poison, a historical legacy, that predates his abominable presidency. But this isn’t mere speculation or exaggeration. Our bodies and psyches are a record of this history: chains, enslavement, dehumanization, scarred backs, raped bodies, castrated bodies, broken necks, broken family ties, denied rights, denied citizenship, mass incarceration, and slow death. Indeed, there are those Black voices who not only recorded this history, but who understood its fascistic logics. For example, Black poet and activist Langston Hughes wrote:

Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.

And it was Black sociologist and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois who wrote, “We have conquered Germany … but not their ideas. We still believe in white supremacy, keeping Negroes in their place.”

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