Abstract
<p>America has always tried to imagine itself as a country where fascism could never happen. This book challenges that myth by showing how the U.S. legal system has provided an ongoing basis and inspiration for fascist movements within the United States, in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and across the colonial world. <italic>We Charge Genocide!</italic> shows that what legal scholars and historians have traditionally called American “rule of law” is better understood as the “rule of race,” the systematic deployment by judiciaries, courts, and the police of racialized legal meanings and processes which lock people of color into an iron cage of legal and extra-legal violence. <italic>We Charge Genocide!</italic> makes this argument by tracing a legal historiography of American fascism, from the Constitution’s defense of slavery, to contemporary “legal originalism” which seeks to deny African Americans and other marginalized people full citizenship. Drawing from the 1951 Civil Rights Congress petition to the United Nations charging the U.S. government with genocide, the book shows how the U.S. legal system has nurtured fascist politics through a “dual state” structure meant to deny persons of color, especially women, queer, and trans persons of color, full and equal protection under the law. It also shows how radicals within the Black Panther Party and Black Lives Matter movement have charged America with fascism by putting the U.S. legal system on trial. <italic>We Charge Genocide!</italic> proves that fascism is nearly unthinkable without the influence of U.S. law.</p>