Please join Charisse Burden-Stelly for their lecture.

This talk, drawn from my book Black Scare/Red Scare, analyzes how during the “Black Scare/Red Scare Longue Durée” the invention of “witchwords” was a technique of repression anchored in the exigencies of what I call “U.S. capitalist racist society.” According to W.E.B. Du Bois, “We invent witchwords. If in 1850 an American disliked slavery, the word of exorcism was ‘abolitionist’. He was a ‘nigger lover’. He believed in free love and murder of kind slave masters. He ought to be lynched and mobbed. Today the word is ‘communist.’… If anybody questions the power of wealth… or advocates civil rights for Negroes, he is a communist, a revolutionist, a scoundrel, and is liable to lose his job or land in jail.” Such invention, I argue, was spurred by the Black Scare, the Red Scare, and their articulations that imbricated economic democracy and Black liberation as political impossibilities and that dictated the distribution of rights, resources, life, and death in U.S. capitalist racist society.

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_XQU-HFEBRW-X8GHN1XfDzA