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Denise Lynn, Charisse Burden-Stelly. Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 493–494, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae626
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Charisse Burden-Stelly’s Black Scare/Red Scare posits that anti-Blackness and anticommunism are tools deployed by Wall Street imperialists to empower what she describes as a capitalist, racist US society. The book is consciously progressive as Burden-Stelly acknowledges her commitment to liberatory politics and desire to dismantle the “legitimating architecture” that perpetuates capitalist exploitation and racism (14). The text adds to the existing scholarship on racial capitalism by positioning anticommunism as a driving force behind efforts to fix capitalist expansion as the centerpiece of US politics. Concomitant with the rise of Wall Street imperialism is Black colonial exploitation in the United States and abroad, and the demonization of challenges to capitalist power as communist treachery. For Burden-Stelly, red scares have therefore been used to affirm anti-Black oppression and legitimize white supremacy.
The book focuses on the period between World War I to the early Cold War, the time between what have generally been benchmarked as the first and second Red Scares. This challenges the traditional understanding of anti-red hysteria and follows the United States’ emergence as a global capitalist power and its weaponization of anti-progressivism to justify its power. In US political parlance, democracy is defined as choice in the marketplace; thus, US militarism secured Wall Street imperialism by rebranding colonialism under the guise of spreading and securing democracy. The Black Scare/Red Scare is especially powerful during wartime (which scholars have shown is nearly all the time in US history) and is used to silence activists who challenge militarism and point to the United States as a failed democracy unable to secure rights anywhere, let alone within its own borders. Burden-Stelly reasons that as a result, US policymakers have forced on Americans the choice between peace (i.e., communism) and impoverishment and endless war (128). Red scares, therefore, were not confined to specific timeframes and operated in perpetuity to link progressive reforms to communist conspiracy.
