Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antiforeignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling

The conjuncture of antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness[1] has been constitutive of and endemic in U.S. governmentality, virtually since its inception. Building on Carole Boyce Davies’s important contributions to the discourse on “deportable subjects,” this article theorizes the ways in which the trifecta of foreignness, Blackness,[2] and radicalism came to be understood as mutually constituting forms of subversion and sedition against which extreme forms of violence and exclusion were imposed. Davies argues that historically, deportation and incarceration have been linked technologies of dispossession used to punish, criminalize, and render stateless “alien” militants who defy the liberal pedagogy of the U.S. state.[3] Using the repression of West Indians Claudia Jones and Cyril Lionel, Robert (C.L.R.) James, and U.S. radical Paul Robeson, I show that antiforeignness applied not only to origin, but also to ideas and internationalist politics. Radical Black internationalism[4] in particular reified the Black—irrespective of citizenship status—as outsider that must be contained and circumscribed. Such anxiety is manifested in the Internal Security Act of 1950, which aimed to destroy “worldwide revolutionary movement[s],” especially Communism, that sought to establish themselves in “countries throughout the world” in order to spread their treachery, deceit, sabotage, espionage, and terrorism.[5] The coupling of treachery, deceit, revolutionary, and “world-wide” codified forms of radicalism that moved beyond the bounds of the United States as both an internal and external threat, and justified virulent forms of anti-internationalism. This became articulated to Blackness because the international has always-already been the position of Blackness in the United States, given the Black’s location on the constitutive outside of the American state. Radical Black internationalism came to be understood as violent, terroristic, antidemocratic, dangerous, and fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. state, and deserving of subjection, surveillance, suspicion, discipline, and punishment. As such, the West Indian’s embodied foreignness and internationalism, and the U.S. Black radical’s “foreign” and internationalist ideas, constituted a particular threat that was incompatible with loyalty to the United States. Consequently, their form of militancy was systematically targeted and confronted through exclusion, defamation, deportation, and incarceration.

West Indians were particularly targeted because a multitude of Blacks in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), starting in the 1920s, were West Indian workers that analyzed the struggle of the U.S. Black working class as part of the larger fight of the international racialized proletariat against capitalist imperialism and coloniality.[6] If, as Wilfred Adolphus Domingo argued, West Indian intellectuals made up the majority of radicals in Harlem concerned with political economy because they understood race and class within an internationalist framework and in its relation to colonial capitalist class relations and social hierarchy,[7] then it is fair to assume that their increased presence in the United States starting in the 1920s radicalized antiracist, anticolonial, and anti-imperial struggles. Department of Justice policy and practice aimed to expunge radical organizations that heavily depended on immigrants, aliens, or racialized persons whose citizenship was precarious and could be easily revoked through criminalization. However, the “conferring of statelessness” treated as “foreign” not only persons without U.S. citizenship, but also those whose “un-American” politics negated their status as citizen. In other words, antiforeignness applied not only to those who came from elsewhere, but also those whose ideas were in opposition to the government’s policies and were therefore portrayed as “alien” and associated with “deportable criminals.”[8]

On April 4, 1948, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born called an emergency conference to contest the deportation of scores of non-citizens activists, including the West Indians Claudia Jones and Ferdinand Smith, on the grounds of “political opinion.” The Committee argued that these deportations were meant to deny constitutional rights to “aliens” and to undermine the civil liberties of Americans.[9] The punishment imposed on “aliens,” particularly by the McCarran Act, for “thinking, saying, writing, or belonging to anything which the Government might disapprove or from reading any newspaper or book or associating with any person whom the Government might claim to be subversive,“[10] served to destabilize the citizenship of all Black radicals, irrespective of national origin.

“Aliens” and citizens alike were slandered as subversive if they were, or had ever been, associated with any organization on the Attorney General or House Un-American Activities Committee lists of subversive organizations; this was especially detrimental for Blacks, insofar as many organizations that challenged racism, colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation—including the Civil Rights Congress, the Council on African Affairs, and the Southern Negro Youth Conference—had been listed.[11] Thus, concomitant with the threat or reality of deportation was incarceration and the denial of free movement, exemplified by the revocation of or refusal to renew passports without court proceedings or due process. This practice, used against countless “subversives” to deny them the accoutrements of citizenship, was ubiquitous until Kent v. Dulles ruled it unconstitutional in 1958. Persons including William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, William Patterson, Eslanda Robeson, and Marvel Cooke were subjected to this form of persecution, which severely hampered their social lives, political activism, and ability to make a living.[12] Other radicals, like Ferdinand Smith and Vicki Garvin, suffered a similar fate abroad, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. State Department colluded with officials in Britain and Africa to tamper with their passport and visa privileges.[13]

These arguments are contextually situated in the regime of repression I call the “McCarthyist Structure of Feeling.”[14] It spans the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (commonly known as the Smith Act), the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (often referred to as the Taft-Hartley Act), Executive Order 9835 (the “Loyalty Order”) of 1947 and its supersession by Executive Order 10450 in 1953, the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, and the Internal Security Act of 1950 (also known as the McCarran Act). It was under this legal architecture that scores of radicals were indicted, deported, incarcerated, surveilled, and forced underground.[15]

Interaction Metaphors and Deportable Subjectivity

Antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness became interaction metaphors that mutually informed the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling. Interaction metaphors “‘interact’ to produce a meaning that is a resultant of the interaction” and “cannot be simply reduced to literal comparisons … without loss of meaning or cognitive content, because meaning is a product of the interaction between the…parts of the metaphor.”[16] Antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness were “active together” to give meaning to un-Americanness, non-citizenship, dangerous threat, and subversion. The historical repression of the Black because of his embodied threat to the racialized socioeconomic order was deployed against “foreigners” and radicals that likewise threatened the system of capitalist accumulation organized around the U.S. imperialist and hegemonic State. In turn, antiblackness was reconstituted through xenophobic, anti-internationalist and antiredistributive policies because of the “threat” of foreign authoritarianism that forms of radicalism ostensibly advocated. Antiforeignness and antiradicalism reinvigorated antiblackness because the latter was a technology used to stabilize the capitalist order by legitimating and naturalizing wealth, power, and privilege hierarchies, especially the social division of labor.[17] This “…metaphorical system provided the ‘lenses’ through which people experienced and ‘saw’ the differences between”[18] whiteness and Blackness, the citizen deserving of rights and the non-citizen/foreigner deserving of discipline and who is to be punished, and the good American and the un-American radical/ foreign-inspired internationalist. The state was able to use anxieties about the Black to codify the dangers of the foreigner and radical, and vice-versa, because, “…in an interaction metaphor, a ‘system of associated commonplaces’ that strictly speaking belong only to one side of the metaphor are applied to the other…what makes the metaphor effective ‘is not that the commonplaces shall be true, but that they should be readily and freely evoked.’”[19] Through metaphor, foreigner/radical/Black was “readily and freely evoked” as subversive/ un-American/non-citizen. The radical and foreigner, through commitment to the “overthrow” of the U.S. government, came to be understood as inherently subversive and therefore non-citizen; the Black, by virtue of his/her tenuous citizenship, lacked allegiance to the state and was always-already prone to insurrection and sedition. This interactions and associations changed the meaning of each part of the metaphor, and made each part seem more alike “in some characteristic way.”[20] The foreigner, the radical, and the Black became interchangeable as suspicious, subversive, and inherently destabilizing. Because of the actual and presumed challenge to U.S. forms of governmentality, they became represented as aligned with enemies of the United States, and undeserving of citizenship, rights, privileges, and entitlements.

In 1949, the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities asserted that the pre-eminent choice of every citizen in 1949 was “[t]o go Communist or not to go Communist,” and those who chose the former were spies, revolutionaries, and conspirators.[21] The latter choice to “go communist” resulted in foreclosure from citizenship because, “nobody…can be a Communist and a good citizen of the United States of America at the same time.”[22] This reduction to the status of non-citizen was intimately related to the historical reality of Blackness, insofar as legitimate claims against the state—that is, for slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, disenfranchisement, and daily indignity—transformed the Black into the quintessential anti-American threat with the real possibility of destabilizing the social and economic order of the state. In this way, the metaphor of the foreigner, the radical, and the Black allowed the state to construct “similarities that the metaphor itself help [ed] constitute” and to these “make new features into ‘signs’ signifying inferiority.”[23] This metaphor provided the basis for the Mundt-Nixon Bill (which did not pass the Senate in 1948 but provided many of the provisions of the Internal Security Act of 1950), which aimed to expose communists and communists fronts, force the latter to register with the attorney general and plainly state that their “propaganda was subversive,” forbid communists from obtaining passports or government jobs, and make it illegal for persons to try to propagate an “authoritarian dictatorship” linked to a “foreign Power” in the United States.[24] The Bill, as documentary practice, created the conditions of slippage allegiance to a foreign power on the one hand, and any form of mobilization that challenged the U.S. state on the other. Its effect was to facilitate the transformative representation of demands for civil rights, equal incorporation into the economy, and an end to racism as antidemocratic and foreign-inspired. As Carole Boyce Davies writes, “That the activities of those who struggle for rights against racist domination were identified as subversive in every instance and were always linked to Communism, or called Communism outright…reveals an important connect between U.S. state repression and racism.”[25] This linkage mutated racialized struggles for justice and liberation into subversion and sedition because they challenged the extant policies and practices of the U.S. State. As interaction metaphors that provided the meaning for “un-American” and “subversive,” antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness eviscerated the difference between challenges to white supremacy and challenges to capitalist exploitation because both opposed the pedagogy of the U.S. State and its practices. A 1952 ad in The Baltimore Afro-American entitled, “In Defense of Negro Leadership!” elucidates the ways in which antiradicalism, antiblackness, and antiforeignness worked together to produce violent foreclosure from the state and citizenship. It notes that the “most courageous” Black leaders who worked for racial progress—especially those associated with the Communist Party—were subjected to deportation, denaturalization, FBI investigation, imprisonment, and the preclusion of travel. The Smith Act in particular was being used to suppress, destroy, and misconstrue as subversive militant forms of protest directly aimed at improving the welfare of Black people.[26] The McCarran and Smith Acts targeted “aliens” and radicals to scare and intimidate Black people, and to discourage their struggle for full citizenship. Although such discipline was neither limited to Black radicals, nor applied uniformly to them, they were nonetheless considered especially dangerous and subversive because their anticolonial, anti-imperial, antiracist, socialist, and pacifist forms of activism directly challenged the foundations of the American state: racialized, militarized capitalist exploitation.

Claudia Jones

The harassment, surveillance, and ultimate deportation of Claudia Jones is emblematic of the preceding (il)logic. Jones moved to Harlem in 1924, and in 1936, inspired by the Communist defense of the Scottsboro boys, she joined the Young Communist League. By 1945 she had joined the Communist Party USA, and in 1948 she was elected to the National Committee.[27] Her Communist affiliation resulted in the denial of her application for U.S. citizenship in 1940 because, as a member of the Communist Party, she was “guilty” of advocating the forceful and violent overthrow of the American government. This rationale was used to criminalize, exclude, and remove all aliens whose radicalism directly challenged the status quo.[28] Jones was first arrested and sent to Ellis Island in 1948, and in 1950 at a deportation hearing, the Immigration and Naturalization Service found her guilty of being an alien that joined the Communist Party.[29] It was a combination of Jones’s Communism/radicalism, position as alien/immigrant/outsider, and her Blackness that made her a prime target of the U.S. government. The government was using her Communist affiliation and her “additional penalty of being foreign born and Negro in the United States,“[30] to distort her advocacy for civil rights into subversive and un-American—and therefore punishable—activity. The FBI arrested her again in 1951 under the McCarran Act, along with sixteen other Communists, for violating the Smith Act.[31] She was convicted of “teaching and advocating the overthrow of the US Government by force and violence…help[ing] to organise the Communist Party whose aim was the same; and…issu[ing] a directive to this effect which was circulated in the Party’s theoretical journal Public Affairs.”[32] After the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal, she was imprisoned in 1955 and deported on December 9 of that same year.

The threat of Jones’s radicalism and Blackness was evident in her 1949 essay entitled, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women!”[33] The eradication of the problems she identified—including the concentration of Black women in unskilled, primarily domestic service; the social, political, and economic marginalization of Black women because of their position at the bottom of society; and the undermining of left-radicalism through the exclusion and disregard for Black women—would have fundamentally destabilized the organization of American society. This was because Negro women were oppressed as women, as Negroes, and as workers, and therefore were the group from which the most surplus value was extracted. In effect, they were considered to be “backward, inferior, and the natural slaves of others.”[34] Although Black women were subjected to all major forms of exclusion and exploitation, race was the primary mode through which their triple oppression was experienced. As early as 1936, the Black communist freedom fighter Louise Thompson was utilizing the term “triple exploitation” to explain that Black women were oppressed as workers, as women, and as Blacks; that same year, Marvel Cooke, another Black Communist luminary, and Ella Baker, a radical civil rights activist, published an article in which they studied this form of superexploitation as it related to Black domestic workers. Cooke and Baker argued that being female, Black, impoverished, and inordinately victimized by the ravages of the Great Depression forced domestic workers to auction their labor for a “slave wage” of between fifteen and thirty cents an hour. Black domestics also suffered incalculable indignities at the hand of white (often Jewish) women. Patterson, Cooke, and Baker proved that the conditions of Black abjection and extreme poverty were exacerbated by the reality of gender.[35]

It was Claudia Jones who popularized triple exploitation in “An End to the Neglect,” advancing that the structural position of Black women resulted in their overrepresentation in the labor market; confinement to the lowest-paying jobs; exclusion from all but the most menial fields of work; and wages that were significantly lower than those of all men and white women. Although her analysis was a call for justice generally, it was specifically aimed at redressing scotomas of the left that failed to mobilize the revolutionary potential of Black women, who were the most militant and therefore essential to ending exploitation. As such, she was “issuing a directive” that, because it aimed to empower those at the bottom to topple the structures that continually dispossessed them, represented an act of force and violence. Jones wrote: “The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than may progressives seem to know, that once Negro women undertake action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced.”[36] Jones argued that Black women’s responsibility as partial or sole breadwinner, along with their treatment in the labor market, explained their active participation in the social, political, and economic life of the Black community; to exclude or relegate their role and experience was to reproduce the conditions of black marginalization generally because Black women were “the real active forces—the organizers and the workers.”[37] Furthermore, the failure of progressive unions to organize Black domestic workers—who were unprotected by social and labor legislation—or to support the Domestic Workers union, continued the subjection of the most vulnerable groups of workers to exploitation and chauvinism.[38] The unequal relationship between Black domestic workers and male and white women workers perpetuated and legitimized hierarchical relationships; precluded organization for equality across race, class, and gender lines; and discouraged Black women from joining progressive and radical organizations. Jones was dangerous because, as Walter Rodney explains, her position “remains revolutionary, because it aims…at undermining that system of production and the political relations which flow from it…[which is] subversive of and antithetical to the maintenance of the system of production in which we live.”[39]

In addition to Jones’s anticapitalist, antiracist, and gender egalitarian position that contravened the elemental aspects of U.S. society, her advocacy of peace reified her status as “alien.” Pacifism, according to the Justice Department, made her susceptible to foreign influence (especially that of the Soviet Union), and her aversion to militarization (including universal military training, armed intervention, military loans for imperialist intervention, and aggression in world affairs) and exorbitant defense spending under the pretext of national security made her patently un-American.[40] Advocacy for peace had come to be inexorably linked to subversion due to what anticommunists dubbed the Communist “peace offensive.” Many activists, who promoted peace became objects of government surveillance, were jailed, were indicted, and/or were exiled. The most notable is W.E.B. Du Bois, who was indicted on February 9, 1951, for failing to register the Peace Information Center under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938.[41] The case was ultimately dropped on November 20, 1951, largely because of the overwhelming international outpouring of support for Du Bois.[42] It was such internationalism that made pacifism dangerous because it undermined and checked U.S. power. The international peace movement’s trenchant critique of U.S. foreign policy threatened to expose the virulence of U.S. racial violence to the world. Jones’s politics were considered both alien and seditious because it moved beyond the liberal, gradualist pedagogy of the U.S. state; challenged the income, wealth, and class disparities that constituted U.S. society; condemned racialized and gendered forms of superexploitation; and called into question the global axial divisions of labor. In the final analysis, the conjoining of redistribution, antiracism, civil rights, and peace was found to be in violation of U.S. immigration laws, and for it, she received the “Bittleman treatment.”[43]

C.L.R. James

Upon invitation from James P. Cannon, leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), James arrived in the United States in 1938 to keep the SWP abreast of happenings in Europe, and to help develop a position on the Negro struggle.[44] However, James was not a Communist; he was an independent Marxist and a fellow traveler of the “factory-worker left”[45] that believed in democratic rights and the full recognition of Blacks as Americans.[46] This form of radicalism was just as threatening as communism because it inhered in a revolutionary epistemology that was vociferously critical of antiblack exploitation. Even though James was an avowed anti-Stalinist and had renounced Trotskyism by 1941, he was considered subversive because he was foreign, radical, and Black. His ideas and scholarship, geared toward bringing the Black masses to consciousness about their conditions and possibilities, were considered to be dangerous. James was suspect because he was a writer producing work focused on race, radicalism, and revolution; he was involved in groups that forged close international and anticolonial ties; and thus the State believed he had the potential to incite the overthrow of the United States government. As James argued, “It now appears that such work…on some of the burning problems of the day, have unfitted me to become a citizen of the United States.”[47] C.L.R. James’s case is the quintessential example of the conjuncture of antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness, and its usage by the U.S. government to expel racialized dissidents from the nation’s borders.

James’s critique, which addressed not only the erasure of Black revolt, but also the historiographical distortions produced by racist capitalists, discredited the entanglement of antiblackness and capitalist accumulation inhered in American society. He asserted, “The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians. All this revolutionary history can come as a surprise only to those who…have not ejected from their systems the pertinacious lies of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. It is not strange that the Negroes revolted. It would have been strange if they had not.”[48] His work aimed to elucidate that Blacks were historical subjects who produced persons engaged in revolutionary struggle.[49] Since James’s historical materialism fundamentally challenged white supremacy and capitalist exploitation, it amounted to a form of heresy[50] that undermined the way the United States projected and understood itself. It was, therefore, equal to communism in its sedition. James attempted to write Black people the formation of modernity, which contravened all of the foundational myths of the United States, white supremacy and Western civilization.

Moreover, along with Raya Dunayevska (also know as Freddie Forest), James (holding the pseudonym J.R. Johnson) formed the Johnson-Forest tendency within the Workers Party. “Johnsonites” theorized capitalism as an impediment to the autonomy, self-determination, and self-possession of workers, which resulted in fragmentation of and alienation from the self. James’s studies of great revolutions of the past revealed to him that it was the most downtrodden and alienated populations that brought the revolution into fruition;[51] for this reason, Black people were an essential to the overthrow of capitalism. As Grace Lee Boggs wrote in her autobiography, the Johnson-Forest tendency was fundamentally predicated on the autonomous Black and an “attac[k] [on] the alienation of human beings in the process of capitalist production.”[52] James and his interlocutors contended that “the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historical roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is traveling with great speed and vigor.”[53] They believed that workers—especially Black workers—did not need a vanguard or an organization to organize them because spontaneity and “the free creative activity of the proletariat” was the essence of revolution.[54] This position was a direct confrontation of the racial class relations in the United States. James’s conviction that independent Black struggle should be supported because Black uprising for justice possessed the force to upend American capitalism made him one of the most threatening theoreticians and intellectuals in the United States.

Shortly after World War II, the immigration and Naturalization Services started to harass James about overstaying his visitor’s visa. Upon the threat of deportation, he left voluntarily in the spring 1953 to preserve the possibility of returning at a later time.[55] Even though he had registered with the government every year as required by the Alien Registration Act, his application for extension of his visa and subsequent appeals were denied. Starting in 1948 and ending in 1950, James was examined by government officials and questioned about his political ideas.[56] At the age of 51, James was arrested by the U.S. government and sent to Ellis Island on June 10, 1952.[57] As soon as he arrived, he was placed in a special room for political prisoners along with five communists. Even though James was not a communist, and was in fact repulsed by them and had written and translated many books against them,[58] as a Black radical he was no different than the red “subversives.” This logic is evident in the rejection of his appeal under the McCarran Act, which referred specifically to Communists,[59] even though James had never been associated with the Party. To the U.S. government, James’s foreignness, radicalism, and Blackness mooted any qualitative difference between his antiracist and pro-labor politics and that of the Communists. Their alleged subversion, and therefore their treatment, was the same.

Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson was arguably the most prolific Black artist and political activist of the 20th century. His meteoric rise in fame and fortune was equaled only by his precipitous decline, brought on by U.S. antiradical and anti-internationalist repression. Robeson’s mobilization against Jim Crow, colonialism, fascism, and labor exploitation, on the one hand, and the state’s disciplining, discrediting, and ultimate Blacklisting of him, on the other hand, paved the way for subsequent struggles for Civil Rights and equality.[60] His radical Black internationalism, socialism, and antiracism, coupled with his fame and influence throughout the world, made him the most dangerous man during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling because his politics challenged the image—and the liberal economic interests—that the United States was trying to export abroad. The worldview of the Truman Doctrine—that the United States represented a democratic force battling for freedom against the global forces of authoritarianism, aggression, and backwardness—was imbedded in U.S. national consciousness through techniques of propaganda, policing, and crisis politics.[61] The conflation of loyalty and security, and the collapsing of “traditional American values” into internal security concerns, placed severe economic, legal, and political restraints on Blacks, radical activists, “aliens,” and citizens deemed suspicious. Such discourse produced Robeson as a hindrance to national defense and a threat to national security because he revealed the entanglements of America’s racist domestic policy, imperial foreign policy, and anticommunist hysteria.[62] The explicit labeling of opponents of Cold War discipline and surveillance as subversives and communists created effective constraints upon political activities of a dissident nature. In the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling, “discourses of difference were articulated with those of treason;” thus, both Blackness and communism—as a catchall for radicalism—“and their articulation became key elements in a semiotics of disloyalty.”[63]

Robeson’s experience elucidates how antiradicalism coalesced with antiinternationalism to variously undermine racial struggles that challenged dominant modes of accumulation, labor relations, and social hierarchy; to discredit non-Western ideological formations as undemocratic, totalitarian, and/or authoritarian; and to conscript the decolonizing world into the U.S.-led mode of accumulation. Forms of radical Black internationalism that challenged the authority of the United States were misrepresented as “Communist,” irrespective of the ideology, and were confronted through military, political, physical, and economic violence. One such example is Robeson’s work in the Council on African Affairs (CAA), founded in 1937; Vicki Garvin argued that Communist hysteria was being used against anybody fighting colonialism, especially in Black Africa.[64] The CAA was one of the most forceful antifascist and anticolonial organizations with international influence,[65] and for that reason it was named a “communist front” organization in 1943.[66] The red-baiting was exacerbated after Max Yergan, who was ousted in 1948 after a very public legal battle with the radical faction (which included Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, and Doxey Wilkerson), claimed that the CAA has been overtaken by communist elements—an argument he also used to shut down the leftwing newspaper People’s Voice the previous year.[67] Due to the pressures of Brownell v. Council of African Affairs, a case filed on April 22, 1953 under the Internal Security Act of 1950, the CAA Executive Board decided unanimously to disband on June 17, 1955 to avoid being brought before the Subversive Activities Control Board on July 11 of that year.[68] It’s ex-members found it difficult to find employment; many, including Alphaeus Hunton, Shirley Graham, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and Vicki Garvin, harnessed their internationalist and anticolonial networks to settle, at least for a time, in Africa.[69]

The disciplining of Paul Robeson through the delegitimizing of Black radicalism remains significant to the forms of Black mobilization that are sanctioned by the state, and the forms that are targeted, suppressed, and discredited. The deployment of communism as a catchall for multifarious forms of radicalism “was tailored to swee[p] in its ambit just about all who were not conservative” and to target those who had a particular investment in the reorganization of the American racial, political, and economic order.[70] These vague and capacious criteria were used to target Black radicalism in particular because it exposed that “the crisis culture” produced by anticommunist hysteria was little more than a rationalization and justification for U.S. hegemony and the spread of racial capitalism. In 1948 Robeson asserted, “It is clear that Negro Americans will lose even our right to fight for our rights unless an aroused American people puts a halt to the government’s hysteria-breeding attacks upon Communists. The recent ‘round-up’ of national Communist leaders reminds us all too much of the first step fascist governments always take before moving to destroy the democratic rights of all minority groups.”[71] In other words, the disciplining of communism was inextricably linked to the repression of all types of activism for freedom, liberation, and justice.

Robeson was one of the most egregious victims of this linking up of antiinternationalism, antiradicalism, and antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling. He was disciplined by the U.S State for his politics, which included a combination of agitation for civil rights, workers rights, redistribution, anticolonialism, and world peace.[72] He supported the Soviet Union and its argument that racism and discrimination were alive and well in the United States; he co-founded the CAA, in which he petitioned the U.S. State Department and the United Nations for an end to colonialism; and he agitated on behalf of international peace, which the U.S. State deemed Communist-inspired subversion.[73] Starting in 1946, Robeson was continually called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in 1949, after a speech he made at the World Conference of Partisans for Peace in Paris, the American state and press systematically targeted him. The Associated Press (AP) erroneously reported that Robeson compared the U.S. government to that of Hitler and the Nazis. This misrepresentation was reprinted throughout the United States, and in Paul Robeson, Jr.’s opinion, under Yergan’s oversight, the State Department went through the U.S. embassy in Paris, “precooked” the erroneous statement, and sent it to AP dispatch before Robeson even spoke. He substantiates his claim by stating that Walter White gave a statement to the press about Robeson’s speech before it had even happened.[74] Though the latter claims have never been substantiated, the State’s incessant harassment and demonization of the elder Robeson lends credibility to his son’s position. Robeson’s career and public image suffered irreparably.[75] Robeson’s blacklisting underscored the tenuousness of Black radical citizenship; he was denied civil rights, his movements were heavily policed and restricted, and his passport was canceled in August 1950. Under no circumstances was he to be issued a passport because his travels abroad were considered to be antithetical to the interest of the United States.[76] It was not until 1958 that it was restored. Eight years of banishment from overseas speaking engagements and concerts and refusal by U.S. concert halls to book him for appearances meant that Robeson had lost the bulk of his income and his stature as an international leader. The “red brand of McCarthyism” persisted even after his passport was reissued.[77]

One of the primary aims of restricting Robeson’s movement was to prevent his speeches, organizing, and activism that exposed American racism and imperialism as a matter of policy. Robeson’s position contravened the attempts of the United States to export a rehabilitated image of itself abroad by repressing Black radicals and promoting leaders that were willing to move to the right, like Yergan, Walter White, Edith Sampson, and Ralph Bunche. Unlike Black Cold War liberals, Robeson was not willing to forsake his deep commitment to oppressed people.[78] Black liberal desires for inclusion were inhered in imperial aggression, while Robeson’s commitment to Black radical internationalist solidarity demanded an end to economic exploitation, racial domination, and neocolonial warmongering. As such, he was not willing to compromise his international politics for the promise of full citizenship in the United States—a promise that was predicated on antiforeign, antiradical, and antiblack repression. The deployment of anticommunism to discredit Robeson’s activism penetrated all aspects of his life, and proved to be his undoing.

Conclusion

Given the threat posed by the unification of Blacks, workers, the colonized, and the poor, Black radicals—especially those whose nationality, ideas, and internationalist politics positioned them “foreign”—were subjected to multifarious modes of discipline and punishment. The coupling of antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness resulted in one of the definitive instrumentalities of U.S. state and empire that abjected Black radical thought from dominant discourse. This unique form of subjection was meant to undermine, marginalize, and/or neutralize leftist nationalist and internationalist struggles; interracial and antiracist struggles that challenged American accumulation; and forms of mobilization that contested U.S. imperialism. Any method of organization that challenged the pedagogy of U.S. state and empire was considered subversive and un-American, and therefore fit for investigation, surveillance, and repression. The United States constructed its targets as dangerous and treasonous enemies and insurgents. As such, they were able to deny civil rights, civil liberties, autonomy, and self-determination to “deportable subjects” that refused to take a staunch anticommunist position and that decided to assert freedom and liberation on their own terms.