Speaking to an audience in Harlem in December 1964 after returning from his second trip to Africa, Malcolm X drew connections between the struggle against white supremacy in the United States and the struggle against imperialism abroad. “As long as we think that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo,” he stressed, “you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out.”
Fourteen years earlier, in 1950, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire published his Discourse on Colonialism, a searing polemic in which he denounced the hypocrisy of Western liberals who condemned wartime fascism in Europe while accepting an equivalent system of violent racial subjugation in colonised territories abroad. Fascism on the European continent, Césaire insisted, was but a domestic application of racist logics and violent methods long reserved for colonised non-European populations elsewhere.
Tracing the connections between racism and imperialism
That systemic racism in the United States is deeply connected to the country’s imperialist interventions abroad is a contention central to I Dare Say, a collection of writings by Gerald Horne published earlier this year. One implication of this argument is that trying to address domestic racism without confronting imperialism is a political approach doomed to fail. In Canada, too, Horne’s argument remains deeply relevant for strategizing anti-racist struggles today.
Horne, a historian at the University of Houston, has been incredibly prolific. Now 75 years old, he has published over thirty books and around a hundred articles. He is also a consummate activist. In 1968, he got his start in the Black liberation movement when, as a law student at Berkeley, he did legal work for the Black Panther Party and taught classes at Vacaville State Prison. To this day, Horne continues to teach, publish, and speak publicly. He remains an unwavering radical.
I Dare Say comprises 12 articles by Horne published between 1992 and 2021. The connection between racism and imperialism is a theme running through the book as a whole. But the chapter topics vary widely — from a review of Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X biopic, to a political biography of Shirley Graham Du Bois, to an inquiry into the 16th-century roots of genocidal settler colonialism in North America.
Horne’s historical survey is thus wide-ranging. Yet, evident through it all is his commitment to spotlighting the contributions of exemplary Black leftists. These are individuals — William L. Patterson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Paul Robeson, for example — who faced fierce repression for advancing an interconnected politics of Black liberation, internationalism, and socialism. Horne contends that in the US, one outcome of Cold War repression of Black Marxists and radicals is the present-day dominance of a milquetoast liberalism that “refuses to stray beyond the shores of this nation” in its attempt to grapple with white supremacy and domestic racial inequality.
A cautionary tale of capitulation
To expose the limits of social movements that lack anti-imperialist commitments, Horne examines the case of different organisations’ capitulation to McCarthyist red-baiting.
Until the late 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) was vocal in supporting anti-colonial independence movements and opposing US imperialism. But under the postwar Red Scare, US government agencies made sweeping accusations of communist affiliation to discredit progressive African American organisations, like the NAACP. This “red tagging of negro protest,” writes Horne, “was designed not only to scare blacks away from their traditional allies of the domestic and international left but also to ensure that protest would not veer from the narrow path of civil rights toward the more perilous terrain of redistribution of wealth and property.”
The NAACP capitulated — it purged leftists and proceeded to self-censor. It avoided taking a stance on global issues that could be viewed “as radical or left wing or beyond the mainstream.” It withheld support for the South African anti-apartheid struggle, in part because the African National Congress was allied with South African communists. Such positions led W.E.B Du Bois to accuse the NAACP in 1948 of being in bed “with the reactionary, war-mongering colonial imperialism of the present administration.”
This conservative turn won the NAACP short-term benefits. The organisation maintained its funding and avoided further persecution. But the move weakened its ability to advance the wider goal of Black liberation.
Paralleling the NAACP’s experience is the postwar history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which likewise capitulated in the face of persecution over its leftist tendencies. “The assault on Left-led CIO unions served to undermine their tradition of militant, interracial struggle,” Horne writes. Shorn of their former leftist commitments, CIO-affiliated unions then “condoned or promoted racism.”
One effect of this Red Scare capitulation was to alienate aggrieved African American youth from what were formerly progressive organisations — weakening, in turn, trade unions as well as the NAACP. And yet, progressive mass-based organisations have always been “the most reliable guarantee” for advancing the interests of national minorities and the working class, insists Horne.
In short, anti-racism, internationalism, and socialism have always had a political synergy. To forsake anti-imperialism thus undermines the struggle against domestic racism, as well as the struggle for socialism.
The enduring relevance of Horne’s analysis
On 20 August 2024, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) National Executive Board (NEB) passed a resolution calling for the resignation of Fred Hahn from his positions as CUPE Ontario President and NEB General Vice-President. Hahn has been a prominent voice for Palestinian solidarity within the Canadian labour movement. The NEB’s attempt to purge Hahn reflects a wider pattern of repression in Canadian institutions against those who have spoken up against the Euro-American-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Hahn has faced slander, libel, and vitriol over his principled internationalist stance, including from Ontario’s Conservative Premier Doug Ford.
But Hahn was democratically elected. The NEB cannot unilaterally expel him. And union members have widely backed Hahn against these politically motivated attacks. In its statement of support for Hahn, and for union solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement more generally, CUPE 3902’s Executive Committee asserted, “freedom struggles everywhere are workers’ struggles and, therefore, integral to the strength of the labour movement.” Amen to that.
Committed anti-racist organisations, like the Toronto chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice, have likewise come out forcefully in support of Palestinian liberation. By contrast, “anti-racists” who have remained silent about the genocide have demonstrated their wilful irrelevance to the wider struggle against racial subjugation.
Jettisoning internationalist solidarity may mitigate reactionary persecution in the short term. But as Horne makes clear, such capitulation will in the end hurt domestic working-class and anti-racist movements. All of this is to say that the left should read Gerald Horne.
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