In her very timely Imperialism and Black Dissent, Nina Farnia proposes that the jurisprudence of political speech and association is best explained not by abstract principles of constitutional law but by a context in which domestic movements intersect with the global projection of American political and military power. Using case studies from four phases of racial resistance in the United States—Black Communism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and the Movement for Black Lives—she disrupts the commonly accepted narrative that both First Amendment jurisprudence and the state’s targeting of particular ideologies are “colorblind” processes.
For Farnia, “[b]ecause domestic security in the United States necessarily involves the management and suppression of racialized rebellion and radical dissent, national security ideology and the First Amendment cannot be decoupled.” (P. 403, emphasis added.) What’s interesting here is not the fraught relationship between individual rights and collective security—we’ve circled that rock often enough since 9/11—but Farnia’s thoughtful and detailed discussion of the interplay of ideological and racial repression.
Received history tends to portray American communism from the 1920s through the 1950s as a movement of Euroamericans, particularly recent immigrants; one that is separate and distinct from struggles for Black liberation. This leads to the perception that the state’s unconstrained attacks on “communist” ideology and on association with groups allegedly advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government are not forms of racial subordination. Instead, we are assured that because struggles for racial equality focus on civil and political rights, they have been protected by the Constitution. “Remembrance,” however, “is also ‘a form of forgetting, and ‘the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement…distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.’” (P. 428, quoting historian Jacquelyn Down Hall.) Farnia challenges the notion that Black activists have prioritized civil and political rights over economic and social justice. She contests the framing of Black radicalism solely in terms of nationalism and incorporates Black communists into a history of resistance that has consistently prioritized economic wellbeing as well as racial equality—and has been met, just as consistently, with intense violence.
Imperialism and Black Dissent illustrates that jurisprudence, too, is a form of forgetting. By including the stories of Black Marxists like Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. DuBois—prosecuted, deported, exiled, or otherwise silenced because of their opinions and associations—in the evolution of First Amendment caselaw, Farnia exposes silent spaces in commonly accepted narratives of the struggles for racial equality. Fresh insights emerge from this contextualization. Some concern the history at issue. Thus, Farnia reminds us that the Civil Rights Movement emerged in a period when there were virtually no constraints on the government’s repression of communists, or those it claimed were communists, purportedly because they advocated overthrowing the U.S. government by force and violence. Intriguingly, she argues that this contributed to civil rights leaders’ insistence that their movement be nonviolent, even in the face of intense state (and private) violence. Other insights emerge from Farnia’s examination of relevant Supreme Court cases where, for example, she argues that the assessment of First Amendment protections under equality principles initially appeared promising but ultimately meant only that “the colorblindness that emerged in”—and one might say eviscerated—“equal-protection jurisprudence came to be applied to the First Amendment.” (P. 463.)
Moving from Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign to the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program and the “anticapitalist and anti-imperialist demands” of the Movement for Black Lives (P. 449), Farnia turns to policies implemented by the Trump and Biden administrations. For example, she notes that, under Biden, the Justice Department has continued to prosecute some 350 racial justice advocates charged by Trump administration with violations of the 1968 Civil Obedience Act. (P. 454-55.) Her analysis yields important insights into how the tactics employed by state authorities to eliminate “foreign” threats—which are largely exempted from constitutional scrutiny—have been used to quash Black dissent. Thus, she points out how in 2017, under Trump, the FBI implemented a domestic terrorism program targeting what it termed “Black Identity Extremists,” conflating race and ideology to claim that “perceptions of police brutality” were endangering law enforcement officers. (P. 451.) And Farnia is equally clear that while the Biden Administration’s 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism identifies white nationalism as a significant threat, its proposals will have a particularly strong impact on Black activists, as it expands the militarized repression of those it describes as “‘violently oppose[d to] all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions.’” (P. 451.)
Taken as a whole, this piece sheds light on the intertwining of “race” and “national security,” a construction that conflates ideology and identity to allow the state to slip from one to the other, as convenient, in its quest to protect the status quo. This is the dynamic that so often renders hollow the promises of the First Amendment which, upon close examination, turn out to be almost entirely content- and context-dependent. Peppered with well-researched background facts and illustrative examples, Imperialism and Black Dissent prompts us to consider anew how to respond when First Amendment protections depend on the content of one’s speech, the ideology of one’s associates, and/or the ways one is racialized. These are questions that take on increased urgency in 2024, as students occupy college and university campuses to protest the asymmetric war in Gaza, militarized police forces are deployed to restore “order,” and it’s no longer clear what, if anything, academic freedom means.
Imperialism and Black Dissent is an ambitious project, deserving of book-length treatment. But that is the beauty of synthetic work, work that weaves disparate chunks of knowledge and perception together in ways that profoundly shift our understanding of both the parts and the whole. Farnia’s contribution feels like a gust of fresh air, prompting us to re-examine the familiar, to identify the drivers of ideological and racial repression, and to breathe new life into ideals that have, thus far, failed too many of us.
