On April 25, the comparative literature program hosted Wayne State University African American studies professor Charisse Burden-Stelly for the 20th annual Zantop Memorial Lecture in Carson Hall. Burden-Stelly spoke about her book, “Black Scare/ Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States,” which described the panic surrounding Black equality and communism during the 20th century.
According to Daniel Keane GR’24, the Zantop lecture is held in honor of German language and comparative literature professor Susanne Zantop — who was murdered, along with her husband, Earth sciences professor Half Zantop, in 2001.
“Each year, the Zantop lecture is a bittersweet occasion, for it gives us the opportunity to both mourn the tragic and untimely loss in 2001 of two beloved Dartmouth professors and members of the Upper Valley community and … honor their memory through an intellectual communal gathering of students, faculty, staff and Upper Valley residents alike,” Keane said.
According to Keane, the comparative literature masters cohort — which he is currently a part of — chooses the lecture speaker each year. Keane said the current group chose Burden-Stelly, a member of the political organization Black Alliance for Peace, because she conducts “objective scholarship” on the history of anti-Black oppression and anti-communism in the United States.
“[Burden-Stelly’s] research questions come out of political work, and I think that’s how all intellectual work should function,” Keane said. “It should be rooted in political work that’s for one’s community.”
In her lecture, Burden-Stelly focused on “radical Black organizing” and the We Charge Genocide petition — a 1951 paper from the Civil Rights Congress that accused the United States government of Black genocide based on the United Nations Genocide Convention.
According to Burden-Stelly, the petition “lambasted” the United States for “centuries-long super exploitation and denigration of 15 million African Americans.” Burden-Stelly said the petition drew from “more than 150 cases” of murder or state executions and “more than 350 instances” of beating, maiming, rape of or threats against Black people committed between 1945 and 1951.
Burden-Stelly said the petition “triggered anxieties” among United States lawmakers that the United States government could be “held accountable on the world stage for its endemic violence against Black people.” She added that the anxieties were “tacit agreement” that the crimes mentioned in the petition “amounted to genocide” even though the petition was ignored in the United Nations.
The petition was a “quintessential expression” of radical Black organizing because it “internationaliz[ed]” the struggle against racism and outlined the “political [and] economic roots” of racial violence, according to Burden-Stelly.
Burden-Stelly added that the petition also offered “precise language” for the racial violence against Black people.
“There are certain people who are able to name their experiences and those who aren’t, and so it’s important for us that we use precise language when we’re describing what’s happening … [so] we come up with the sort of relevant solutions on what is to be done,” Burden-Stelly said. "We Charge Genocide meticulously indicted the criminality of capitalist racism and Washington imperialism, setting it apart from two previous petitions to the United Nations.”
Burden-Stelly also defined capitalist racism in the United States as a “racially hierarchical” political economy.
“The petition argued that the foundation of Black genocide was economic and buttressed by law and order and white supremacist terrorism meant to enforce oppression in the service of profit,” Burden-Stelly said.
Burden-Stelly then connected the racial and economic exploitation of Black people in the United States to the Cold War context in which the petition was drafted. She said American aggression during the Korean War — ongoing at the time of the petition — was linked to the ability of the “ruling class to super exploit, expropriate and dispossess” domestically.
According to Burden-Stelly, genocide is “inextricable” from anti-communism as methods to govern “U.S. capitalist racist society.”
“Such governance served to manage and criminalize racial and political others whose ideas and beliefs, as much as their actions, threatened to transform the racialized class order,” Burden-Stelly said.
According to Burden-Stelly, the petition was a “major landmark” of equality in the United States and “sanity in U.S. foreign policy.” However, the petition also contributed to pushback through the proposal of the Bricker Amendment in 1952, which in part declared that the U.S. Constitution could not be “overrun” by international treaties and executive agreements, Burden-Stelly said.
Burden-Stelly ended her lecture by proposing the existence of a “love” that exists in political organizations and is “forged at the intersection of radicalism and repression.” She urged political organizers to discover “humanity” and “love” in revolution.
“Love as radical responsibility is how we sustain organizations and how we trust each other enough to disagree in a way that moves our political objectives forward,” Burden-Stelly said. “Love as radical responsibility, as mutual comradeship, was integral to the charge of genocide in 1951, and it’s invaluable to how we organize against genocide now.”
Guqing Wang GR’24 — a member of the comparative literature masters cohort — said Burden-Stelly’s lecture offered a way to understand “academic investigation” within “a larger context” of the world.
“[Burden-Stelly] does a good job in raising these two areas because I will … as a scholar sometimes find a gap between what I’m writing … and why [it matters] for the real world,” Wang said.
Keane added that Burden-Stelly’s scholarship in history is still “really relevant today.”
“For people doing [political] organizing work, it can be useful and inspiring to draw inspiration [and] lessons from these past struggles,” Keane said.
