Fascism and the Family

Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy connects the two.

Our major anti-totalitarian imaginative texts tend to present fascism as a distortion of, or as inimical to, family life. In 1984, the party encourages children to inform on their parents and sees heterosexual relationships as a potential threat which must be obsessively policed. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the totalitarian society of Gilead is enabled by a catastrophic fall in fertility; the abnormal absence of children creates a patriarchal backlash, in which fathers are given powers over “handmaids”— enslaved sex workers who are ceremonially raped in hopes that they will produce children to be raised by the official wives.

In recent years, though, a number of authors have questioned whether these SF ur-texts are really the best lens through which to understand fascism in general, or our fascist moment in particular. In the 2016 book Race and The Totalitarian Century, Vaughn Raspberry argues that books like Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy about his experiences growing up in the Jim Crow  South can be understood as part of “a literature of the totalitarian experience.”

Raspberry adds that the “formal tension” of Black Boy is the “text’s adaptation of the literary conventions of the antitotalitarian narrative to the experience of Jim Crow, while balancing this essentially political choice with the moral and educational aims of the bindungsroman.” In other words, Wright is telling a story of childhood and growing up, along with a story of totalitarian violence.

Raspberry presents this as a kind of contrast. But I’m not sure Wright does. Instead, in many respects, Wright’s story of growing up in an often abusive and chaotic home is presented as a kind of (anti-) preparation for the experience of abuse and chaos that define life under the totalitarian Jim Crow regime. The family is not a refuge from totalitarianism, nor is it exactly corrupted by totalitarianism. Rather, family dynamics of power and absolute control are similar to, and continuous with, the dynamics of the racist totalitarian state. Wright’s first experience of fascism, his first education in terror, takes place in his own family.

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Interrogation as violence in Black Boy

For Raspberry, an indicative scene of totalitarian violence in Black Boy is set in an optometrist’s office in the south, where young Richard is employed by Mr. Crane, a Northerner who wants to “train a Negro boy in the optical trade.” However, two of Crane’s employees, Pease and Reynolds, are enraged at the idea of a Black person gaining professional opportunities. They set out to terrorize Richard.

The climax came at noon one summer day. Pease called me to his workbench; to get to him I had to go between two narrow benches and stand with my back against a wall.

"Richard, I want to ask you something," Pease began pleasantly, not looking up from his work.

"Yes, sir."

Reynolds came over and stood blocking the narrow passage between the benches; he folded his arms and stared at me solemnly. I looked from one to the other, sensing trouble. Pease looked up and spoke slowly, so there would be no possibility of my not understanding.

"Richard, Reynolds here tells me that you called me Pease," he said.

I stiffened. A void opened up in me. I knew that this was the showdown….

If I had said: No, sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you Pease, I would by inference have been calling Reynolds a liar; and if I had said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you Pease, I would have been pleading guilty to the worst insult that a Negro can offer to a southern white man. I stood trying to think of a neutral course that would resolve this quickly risen nightmare, but my tongue would not move.

“The encounter,” Raspberry writes, “presents a classic double bind of totalitarian domination: facing two equally untenable courses of action, the young narrator replies unsteadily before fleeing the scene… Throughout Black Boy, scenarios like these replicate the conventions of antitotalitarian literature in the geography of the Jim Crow South.”

Raspberry is correct; there are many scenes of interrogation in which young Richard knows that any answer, or no answer, will lead to violence, and in which the interrogation is therefore itself a form of violent assault, intended as humiliation and terror.

Raspberry does not explain, though, that early in the book, these violent interrogations are not conducted by white men. They are instead conducted by members of Wright’s own family.

Learning about fascism at home

As a younger child, Richard’s mother was ill, and he was neglected. He hung out in bars, and the patrons would give him alcohol; he says he was essentially an alcoholic by the time he was 6. He eventually found a more stable living situation with his grandparents and mother and ceased to drink. But the experience obviously affected him.

When Richard was perhaps seven, his very religious grandmother was giving him and his brother a bath. While his grandmother is cleaning his rear, he tells her to kiss him there when she is done.

Richard doesn’t really understand what he said, and is completely unprepared for the violence of his family’s reaction. The house is thrown into an uproar; Richard’s grandmother, mother, and grandfather all threaten him and beat him with their hands and with a switch. He is terrified that they will kill him. The culmination of the beating is an interrogation.

Between strokes of the switch she [his mother] would ask me where had I learned the dirty words and I could not tell her; and my inability to tell her made her furious.

"I'm going to beat you until you tell me," she declared.

And I could not tell her because I did not know. None of the obscene words I had learned at school in Memphis had dealt with perversions of any sort, although I might have learned the words while loitering drunkenly in saloons.

Richard’s family finally blames a young schoolteacher who is boarding with them, Ella; she read to Richard and ignited his love of reading and literature. Richard’s grandmother kicks Ella out of the house. So, for a crime Richard does not really understand, he is attacked by his whole family, badly beaten, and one of the people he is closest to is blamed and sent out of his life forever.

The parallels here with the interrogation at the optometrist aren’t perfect. But they’re nonetheless telling. In both cases, interrogators demand that Richard answer for a transgression of speech norms which mark him as bad, evil, and criminal. In both, he cannot so answer, because there is no answer, or because he does not know the answer. And in both cases, his failure to adequately respond—a failure over which he has no real control—is an excuse for apocalyptic violence from which there is no appeal, and which arbitrarily and permanently stunts his life.

Raspberry notes that Pease and Reynolds are examples of a totalitarian system in which, “truth emerges as whatever the authority of the moment insists it is.” That’s true of Jim Crow. It’s also, though, true of Wright’s family. His grandmother decides Richard is at fault for the neglect he suffered as a child and beats him. She decides Ella is at fault, and tosses her out of the house, with we don’t know what long-term consequences for her.

Richard learns about arbitrary authority and powerlessness at home first. That makes him all the more vulnerable when he encounters both at the hands of white supremacists under Jim Crow.

How to say power

The totalitarian dynamics of the family are perhaps even clearer in Safiya Sinclair’s recent memoir, How To Say Babylon. Sinclair was born in Jamaica; her father, a reggae musician and Rastafarian, was physically and emotionally abusive. Though the memoir does discuss racism in the United States in its final chapters, the bulk of it is focused on Sinclair’s home life, and her struggle to free herself—through educational attainment, through poetry, through a modeling career—from her father’s oppressive power and oppressive religious beliefs.

Sinclair’s father is obsessed with defending her sexual and spiritual purity. He keeps her mostly locked in the house, demands she grow her hair in dreadlocks, and punishes her and her siblings with insults and temper tantrums if they do anything which he considers a transgression.

One of the more painful scenes in a very painful book involves (again) an interrogation and punishment. Sinclair and her siblings (who are poor and often hungry) find a cherry tree in the backyard; the fruit is still unripe, but it tastes good, and they all gorge on it. When their father gets home, he sees them with the fruit, and questions them.

“Fyah, whaddat in your pocket?” he asked.

“Uhm. Some… some cherries, Daddy,” Lij said.

“Try one, Daddy!” Ife said.

I watched his face closely as my siblings spoke and knew his spirit’s candle had already been knocked over. His brow furrowed into a shadow centuries deep, his scar prehistoric. “What yuh mean, cherry?” he said to us, cocking his head sideways. “There is no cherry. The cherries are green.”

“Well… we tried some today,” Lij said, taking a green cherry from his pocket and holding it out to our father. “They actually taste good!”

My father’s face slipped into that deadly smile that did not reach his eyes.

Sinclair’s father goes outside and discovers all the cherries are gone. He is enraged, “He glared at us and we were small, so small he could crush us under heel.” He then beats them all with his belt for the first time. “In the aftermath, my siblings and I sat together in silence huddled like crows on one bed in our shared bedroom, losing the hours that followed in an ugly blur.”

Like the scene discussed above in Black Boy, the parent here demands answers from the children. The children do not understand the import of their answers or of their transgression. Their words and/or lack of words doom them equally. They are questioned, but their responses are essentially immaterial; the punishment is already determined.

The father acts as if the torture and abuse are the natural result, or the required result, of the transgression. But transgressions are everywhere; they are multifarious, mysterious, unavoidable. Anything and everything is a transgression; anything and everything is an excuse for punishment. The interrogator claims to be looking to separate guilt and innocence, but (as in the garden of Eden) innocence only exists as an excuse to find and punish guilt.

The interrogators, in taking upon themselves the right to judgement, set themselves up as absolute power with no appeal. “Out there, with his reggae career stalled, Babylon’s foot was on his neck,” Sinclair says of her father. “In here, he demanded obedience and divine attention, our purity a gauge of the power he still wielded.”

Fascism is about control of the young

Raspberry reads Black Boy as an anti-totalitarian text in part to place racism and racist violence at the center of antifascist imagination and thinking. 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many other core antifascist novels essentially bracket or erase racism; they show us a totalizing fascism which does not discriminate on the basis of skin color. Black Boy, in contrast, shows how racism and racist violence is central to fascist logics, both by providing targets, and by giving certain people (like Reynolds and Pease) an investment in fascist power and fascist enforcement.

If we are using Black Boy as an antifascist text, though, it seems like we should take it seriously when it draws parallels between racist abuse and child abuse. Wright’s antipathy to his grandmother’s religiosity was as deep, and as lifelong, as his antipathy to racism and Jim Crow. Racist apartheid is a scourge in Black Boy, but so are the arbitrary proscriptions, and the violent punishments, of authoritarian parenting. The two, for Wright, join in creating the nightmare landscape of the novel, in which Richard’s life is constrained and defined by the dull, endless, grind of taboo and punishment, of aspiration met with violence, of stigmatization and the impossibility of innocence or purity.

For Wright, race is central to fascism. But so is the family. Racism creates a logic of power and violence for white people. By the same token, stigmatization of children as bad, unpure, and in need of violent correction, gives adults and parents a stake in authoritarian logic and violence.

It’s not difficult to find examples of this in our current fascist moment. Much of right-wing discourse today is focused on denying healthcare to trans youth, and/or to denying young people access to books about Black or queer experience.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that schools are performing surgeries on trans children without parental consent. This is an absurd and disgusting lie. But it’s in line with (for example) the fears that Safiya Sinclair’s father expresses about her being corrupted by Babylon while getting an education. Fascists stoke fears of corruption and encourage violence in defense of “purity.” These anxieties and fantasies often center on control over children. That’s why the right hates public schools, which it fears will allow children access to different ideas, different values, different lives.

Nor are these fascist impulses confined to the right. The bipartisan, and often Democratic led, attacks on student protestors are another case in point. Jason Stanley, in his new book Erasing History, points out that attacks on education are central to fascist campaigns, and that universities are often targeted by demonizing college protestors.

In April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was dragged in front of a congressional committee (whose behavior has come to suspiciously resemble that of the House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1940s and ’50s) to confront the same charges of allowing anti-Semitism (i.e., protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza) to flourish on Columbia’s campus. In response, Shafik capitulated to the committee’s attack on her university, agreeing with their spurious charges and promising to crack down. Her testimony to the committee, and her ensuing actions to call in the NYPD to clear out and arrest the protesting students, spurred divestment campaign encampments in campuses across the United States, to which many universities responded with harsh militarized crackdowns on student protestors. The same right- wing forces that have been attacking universities for decades found a weapon they can cynically employ to draw in wealthy donors and others who might not otherwise support their mission to delegitimize universities.

It's easy to dismiss, insult, and police these protestors in part because they are associated with the Palestinian cause, and racism against Palestinians is widespread. But they’re also easy to dismiss because they are young people, and young people, or children, are seen as impure, corruptible, ignorant, and in need of chastisement and control. Wright and Sinclair describe the fascist dynamics of interrogation and punishment directed against children, in which speech is seen not as an exchange of ideas or an opportunity for education (of parents or children,) but is instead an excuse and opportunity for reassertion of violent authority. The rage against students for daring to say the wrong thing is congruent with the patriarchal rage for fascist control of children.

Fighting fascism means fighting for children

Many people are reluctant to discuss the fascist dynamics of the family as they relate to children. That’s because these dynamics are both popular and widespread. Because of racism, Black families are often accused of being more abusive, and Black families are especially at risk of having their children taken from them by the state. But the truth is that abusive family dynamics are widespread among all families of whatever background. Paris Hilton, the wealthy white heiress, was kidnapped by her family and sent to a hideous reform school where she was physically and sexually abused.

Many parents and adults who have more or less liberal values in other respects believe that parents should have sweeping power to discipline children, up to and including hitting them. In one study, 81% of parents said spanking children was sometimes acceptable. In 15 states, it’s still legal for schools to practice corporal punishment. In every state, it’s legal for parents to strike their children. It is such an accepted and default practice that it is barely discussed except by a few lonely advocates like Jillian Keenan and Stacey Patton.

Families, just about everyone agrees, are formative experiences. That’s true both in the sense that families shape their children, and in the sense that families are seen as blueprints or examples for society and for other social institutions.

And yet, families—as Richard Wright, Safia Sinclair, Paris Hilton, and many others can testify—are often sites of intense, brutal power disparities, abuse, and sweeping, cruel fascist dynamics. Families are where we learn that certain people, by virtue of their identity and their social position, have no rights, and other people can punish them for any transgression or for no transgression. Families are where many people learn about interrogation, violence, abuse, and silence. As Wright suggests, families are often where we learn that resistance is futile, and that we deserve punishment. By normalizing cruel treatment of children, we create a society in which cruel treatment of everyone is normalized.

Black Boy is brilliant because it shows that totalitarianism includes, and is defined by, racist apartheid. It’s also brilliant because it suggests that to defeat fascism means defeating not just the fascism of Jim Crow, but the fascism of the family as well.