Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism with Charisse Burden-Stelly

Today we talk with the prolific and wide-ranging scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly about her new book, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, just out from the University of Chicago Press. The book shows the emergence and conjuncture of two strands of discourse and practice that were used to suppress Blacks in the United States, beginning in the early twentieth century and still present today. The Black Scare created and nurtured a phobic psychic disposition towards Blacks on the basis of race, the Red Scare was based on anti-Bolshevik and anti-Communist fears rampant at the time. The Black Scare was used to maintain White Supremacy, the Red Scare to prop up Capitalism. Charisse Burden-Stelly talks with us about these phenomena on both the national and international stages, and attends to the specific dynamics of gender, race, and class through a series of case studies.

Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history. Their research pursues two complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression; the second area of focus examines twentieth-century Black anticapitalist intellectual thought, theory, and praxis.

 Burden-Stelly is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and my single-authored book titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States is forthcoming in November 2023. They are also the co-editor, with Dr. Jodi Dean, of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022) and the co-editor, with Dr. Aaron Kamugisha and Dr. Percy Hintzen, of the latter’s writings titled Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State.

They also edited the “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality.

Charisse Burden-Stelly’s published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, CLR James Journal, and American Communist History and in popular venues including Monthly Review, Boston Review, Essence magazine, and Black Agenda Report.