"Fascism is a new name for the terror the Negro has always faced in America.”
Langston Hughes wrote these words in 1936. See how history loops?
Hughes was saying that what white Americans in the 1930s were beginning to fear in Europe wasn't new to Black folks at all. Things like state terror, racial scapegoating, mass surveillance, political violence, mobs deputized by law, and lives treated as disposable.
Our daily reality was living under a government that either participated in or turned a blind eye to racial terror with police and vigilantes operating as one. Courts that offered no protection. Propaganda that cast an entire population as dangerous, inferior, or subhuman. We had to endure lynching as social control. That all was fascism before the word.
It may have been new for white folks, but for us, all this shit was weather. It just finally had a name that white folks recognized.
Hughes was pointing to a cruel pattern, just like folks are pointing out today. When terror is reserved for Black people, it is normalized, rationalized, spiritualized, called law and order and heritage, and gaslit. But when the SAME machinery begins to brush up against white bodies, suddenly it gets named “fascism" or "authoritarianism.” Suddenly it’s “a threat to democracy.”
Back then, Hughes was telling white liberals that they were panicking about something abroad that has been domesticated and perfected RIGHT HERE in America. Y'all are calling it “foreign tyranny” when Black folk have been calling it “America.” None of that evil arrived from Mussolini or Hitler. It was already built into the architecture of the United States. Europe was just catching up to what America had normalized, industrialized, and scaled.
So yeah, this feels like history repeating itself, but it’s also delayed recognition. The evil structure has always been here but the targets have shifted. And now, the story finally gets believed.
And the haunting part is that every time, the archive is already there! The warnings already written. The analysis has already been done by Black thinkers decades earlier.
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