JARVIS C. MCINNIS: As a significant contribution to black internationalism and black women’s intellectual history during the Cold War, Race and the Totalitarian Century will also appeal to readers concerned with historical alternatives to the racial and ethno-religious bigotry undergirding contemporary American geopolitics. Although white nationalists are aligning themselves with Russia today, a little more than half a century ago, Rasberry suggests, there was a mutual “love affair” between black people and the Soviet Union. Black socialists such as Du Bois celebrated Russia’s anti-racism and refusal of whiteness, and Russians “loved” and forged solidarity with black people because they epitomized Western liberal democracy’s internal contradictions, i.e., racism.
Furthermore, in contrast to the egregious Islamophobia that pervades our contemporary, post-9/11 moment, black writers and intellectuals such as Richard Wright, Shirley Graham, and James Baldwin believed that because “Islam belonged to the Third World,” it “could be harnessed for anti-imperialism.” Thus, just as Ferguson’s protesters and Palestinians recently found solidarity in their respective fights against oppression, black anti-totalitarian writers and intellectuals at mid-century vigorously engaged Third World freedom struggles to illuminate democratic liberalism’s failure to interrogate its own totalitarian practices and logics and ultimately to imagine a new and freer world order. More here.