State violence against Black Americans laid the groundwork for fascism | Jason Stanley

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 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, Aime Cesaire, 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.