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STATE VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACK AMERICANS LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR
FASCISM  
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Jason Stanley
February 6, 2026
The Guardian
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_ Fascism feeds on the arbitrary killings that have long plagued the
US. Ending the horror starts with abolishing ICE. _

,

 

In a recent Saturday Night Live
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episode, when asked about Minneapolis
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hosts intones
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“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
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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
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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 [[link removed]] 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.

_We are seeing classical theories of fascism unfold in real time_

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
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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
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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
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The terror campaign against Somali immigrants in Minneapolis and (it
looks like [[link removed]]) 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
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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_

_The Guardian_ [[link removed]]_ is globally renowned
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