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Citation: The Nation May 29 1995, v260, n21, p760(1)
Author: Morrison, Toni
Title: Racism and fascism.(excerpt from a March 2, 1995, speech
at Howard University) by Toni Morrison
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COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1995
What follows is an excerpt of a speech Toni Morrison delivered at Howard
University on March 2. Much of the address is concerned with a celebration of
the historic role her alma mater has played in the long battle against
segregation. But in the middle of the speech Morrison abruptly turns to a
consideration of the contemporary face and lineaments of racism and its role
in the construction of a new brand of fascism in this country.
- The Editors
Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a
first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution
is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something,
perhaps, like this: 1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and
diversion. 2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the
utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem
attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy. 3. Enlist and create sources
and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing
process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it
works. 4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that
challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification. 5. Subvert
and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed
enemy. 6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can
sanitize the dispossession process. 7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and
popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of
racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology. 8. Criminalize the
enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas
for the enemy - especially its males and absolutely its children. 9. Reward
mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertaimnents and with little
pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the
press; a little pseudosuccess; the illusion of power and influence; a little
fun, a little style, a little consequence. 10. Maintain, at all costs,
silence.
In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it
nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only
reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial and an
atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.
The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to
be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any
single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism.
Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed
abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right,
left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist - we must not be
blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism
is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed
country can become A suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really
just marketing - marketing for power.
It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge
and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its
determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship; all
nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones - so that the narrow but
protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes
citizens into taxpayers - so individuals become angry at even the notion of
the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers - so the measure of our
value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but
what we own. It changes parenting into panicking - so that we vote against the
interests of our own children; against their health care, their education,
their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the
perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product - a
pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car - or kill generations for control of
products - oil, drugs, fruit, gold.
When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas
"marketplaced," our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength
downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment
value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in
a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to
ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.
Toni Morrison, a member of the Nation's editorial board, won the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1993. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton
University.
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