The first trick of the American fascist

Watching some TV reminded me of this one, from the great VK’s book about driving around the “middle South.”

“The first trick of the American fascist is to drive a wedge between the suffering whites and the suffering blacks of this country.  If the American fascist knows one thing, he knows this: there’s hell to pay for him and all his fascist friends whenever the suffering whites and the suffering blacks of this country unite.

That’s why he eggs on the race-baiters.  Why he laughs when they succeed.  To do this he uses his newspapers, his radio stations. He spouts division, spouts it and hopes the poor and suffering and exploited of America grow confused.  He laughs when they are deluded by the old cheap canard, that the great chasm in this country is race and not class.  The American fascist prays the black and white working people of this country never realize that united, they have all the power in the land.

– Vivian Kent, The Fatback of America (1948)

(photo of a Portland sympathy protest by Casey Parks of The Oregonian)