Thread by @IBJIYONGI

This is the most important book that I read cover to cover in 2017: Race and the Totalitarian Century by Vaughn Rasberry 1/n

He says in the intro: “Very little of the vast literature on totalitarianism has followed the road opened by Arendt, and before her, by WEB Du Bois — who viewed the 1st & 2nd World Wars as interimperialist rivalries fought in, and over, African territory — on the relation between

on the relation between modern racial terror and the onset of total war and totalitarianism. . . Theorists of totalitarianism scarcely include histories of unregulated violence against Black people in their ideological coordinates.” This book fixes that.

It’s almost 400 pages and took me a year and is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read and it was completely worth it.

Rasberry successfully helped me understand and learn to articulate that totalitarianism and racism come as a pair and that white supremacy is a total system that has totalitarian features. White America and Black America live under two different political systems.

On p.93 he says: “The multiple and conflicting representations of the totalitarian experience suggest the concept is as much a literary as a strictly political or ideological construct — even if, to some degree like liberal democracy, it was a political fiction from the start.”

We see a clear connection between why literature matters — as political propaganda to your imagination — so why it matters that our writers keep writing. It situates what Richard Wright and Toni Morrison did/have done with their novels, responding to American totalitarian racism.

Found this note also where you can see the book helped me draw a connection btw discussions I was having with Joseph Martin about his work on contingency theory in #histSTM, critical race theory, and intersectional analysis of Black women in physics, which turned into a paper.

Another note I made: “Totalitarianism = a literary threat of nightmare as well as waking terror” and “integration was perceived by totalitarian regimes as a threat, suggesting racism is a foundational element of totalitarian regimes —> US is totalitarian in its race politics”

In other words, to understand Trump and how Trump is operating, you need to reframe your understanding of American politics as having a totalitarian component embedded in their foundation. White supremacy isn’t a side show: it’s the basis for the whole show.

There’s actually a lot of nuance to Rasberry’s analysis, including a discussion of the difference between “totality” “totalitarianism” and “total war” — can’t really do it justice on twitter (read Chap. 2!) But he makes an important point about not getting distracted:

He argues that if you want to claim that a society is not completely totalitarian, the same arguments go for the question of whether a society is a liberal democracy. I think what comes out of the text, successfully, is that which one you’re in depends on whether you’re white. 😁

I also found that the book helped me rethink Robeson and DuBois. As w/ Shotwell’s Against Purity, Rasberry is less interested in adjudicating whether someone is right than understanding the forces at work, turning the gaze of anger away from imperfect Black ppl to white supremacy

Also, yes, my friends: we can’t just read tweets and news articles, can’t just live in reactive mode. We still need to read and think deeply. We must be agile but not lose our depth or our capacity to take the long view.

The other book I would encourage folks to read in tandem with Race and the Totalitarian Century is Christina Sharpe’s marvelous In the Wake, which has provided a timelike thread for my own work on Black women in physics and social epistemology.

Everything that happens here happens in the wake of slavery. Everything. From particle physics to internment camps, it all happens in the wake of a history that travels with us.

And I mean her book is so significant in my thinking that I have a copy on my phone, my iPad, my computer and next to my desk. I never go ANYWHERE without it. I also give it to friends, regularly.