Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism by James Zeigler (review)

Combining a history of the debilitating effects of the Red Scare and Cold War on the fight for civil rights in the United States with an analysis of the virulent backlash that resulted from the election of the nation's first black president, James Zeigler offers a strong argument against the notion of a postracial America. Analyzing cultural rhetoric of the Cold War era and recent years, he builds on the theoretical framework of "publics and counterpublics" offered by Michael Warner (xviii) to present "evidence that demands the black freedom struggle in the United States and elsewhere be characterized as long, unfinished, and presently in need of repair" (197). Bringing David Roediger's classic work on the "wages of whiteness" into the twenty-first century, he concludes that "Cold War anticommunism worked to ensure white privilege remained a capital advantage" (196). As the most recent presidential election has clearly shown, too many white Americans refuse to relinquish this nonpecuniary benefit, even when it costs them true gains in the form of better working and living conditions for white and black alike. Zeigler's study helps to explain why.

Zeigler begins by applying the theoretical structures presented by Warner in his 2005 Publics and Counterpublics to trace the shifting of mainstream ideas in a way that resembles the Hegelian dialectic. In this instance, the first "public" of concern is the anti–civil rights mainstream that dominated U.S. culture during the Cold War years. The "counterpublic" that vied for acceptance at that point was the civil rights movement. Indeed, civil rights leaders worked so hard to bring their message of equality to the public that they sometimes engaged in anticommunist rhetoric to gain legitimacy for their own movement. Zeigler uses Martin Luther King, Jr. as his prime example to illustrate this point. He traces King's evolution through his early works, which sometimes engage in anticommunist rhetoric, to later works that embrace deeper and more meaningful reform by offering sincere critiques of the United States' economic exploitation of people both domestically and abroad. Through this analysis, Zeigler traces King's maturation as he comes to embrace radical reform. After that, he explores the more radical writings of black intellectuals who had ties to the Communist Party, including Richard Wright, C. L. R. James, and Frank Marshall Davis.

In the end, a new "public" emerged that embraced King, but only after finding a way to ignore his radical side. This public continued to reject the other leaders under discussion, deeming them un-American due to their radical views. Thus, the shift went from a public that was unapologetically conservative and a counterpublic that sought basic civil rights, to a public that celebrated the perceived achievement of civil rights and a counterpublic that embraced communism and other radical, "un-American" ideas. Warner's framework thus provides Zeigler an avenue for explaining how the civil rights movement, once so vehemently opposed by conservatives, could be coopted by conservatives in recent years and incorporated into the dominant social structure in a way that erases the more radical aspects of that movement and turns King into a national celebrity whose perceived victory can be used to illustrate the end of racial strife.

The election of the nation's first black president affected this shifting public sentiment in two ways. On the one hand, it supported the new public's assertion that racism in the United States had been largely eradicated and thus fed into the notion of a postracial society. On the other hand, it fueled a backlash among the conservative counterpublic that continues to maintain racist views and resist progress. While the revised King has entered the mainstream of U.S. culture, any semblance of radicalism in the form of anticapitalist critique has been left in a second counterpublic with men like Davis, a known communist whom right-wing pseudo-intellectuals like Dinesh D'Souza have connected to Obama...