Why You Can’t Understand American Authoritarianism Without Understanding Race

Or: How the War on Black Freedom Became the Infrastructure for War on All of Us

There’s a dangerous silence spreading through progressive organizing right now. Many leaders are moving away from explicit discussions of race and power. The public conversation about Trump’s authoritarianism rarely centers on race except when ICE is explicitly targeting people of color, and even then it’s framed as “immigration” rather than racialized state violence.

I understand the impulse. “Race” became a political liability. We’re told we need to build broad coalitions, that race-specific framing alienates potential allies, that we should focus on “economic anxiety” or “democratic values” instead.

But here’s what I know from decades of studying authoritarian movements: You cannot understand how American authoritarianism works without understanding how it was built on the infrastructure of anti-Black repression. And you cannot dismantle it without naming that directly.

The silence isn’t strategic repositioning. It’s historical amnesia. And it’s going to get people killed.

The Through-Line: From Civil Rights to Mass Incarceration to Mass Authoritarianism

Let me trace the line clearly, because this isn’t ancient history. This is a sixty-year project of building authoritarian infrastructure, and it started as a deliberate counterrevolution against Black freedom.

The Civil Rights Movement as Democratic Threat

The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just about ending segregation. It was the greatest expansion of democracy in American history—enfranching millions, dismantling apartheid, challenging the power structures that had organized American society since Reconstruction ended.

And that democratic expansion terrified the people who benefited from the old order.

When Black Americans gained political power, organized labor movements, built economic independence, and asserted their full citizenship, it threatened not just Southern segregationists but the entire architecture of American hierarchy. Black political power meant challenging how police operated, how jobs were distributed, how housing was allocated, how schools were funded, how power itself was organized.

The response wasn’t just racist backlash. It was a systematic, deliberate project to build the legal and institutional infrastructure to re-subordinate Black Americans and destroy their movements—while maintaining the appearance of formal legal equality.

Nixon’s Drug War: Explicit Racial Control

John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, said it explicitly in 1994:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This wasn’t implicit. This wasn’t dog whistles. This was an explicit strategy to use “law enforcement” to destroy Black political organizing and leadership.

The drug war gave police:

• Expansive search and seizure powers

• Ability to raid homes without knock warrants

• Asset forfeiture to fund departments

• Justification for massive surveillance

• Cover for targeting political organizing as “criminal activity”

It gave prosecutors:

• Mandatory minimums to coerce plea deals

• Conspiracy charges to sweep up entire organizations

• Sentencing disparities (100:1 crack vs. powder cocaine) that explicitly targeted Black communities

• Tools to criminalize association and organizing

It gave the state:

• Legal framework for mass incarceration

• Mechanism to disenfranchise millions (felony disenfranchisement)

• Justification for militarizing police

• Infrastructure for surveillance and control

This was counterrevolution dressed as crime control. And it worked. Black political organizing was decimated. Leaders were imprisoned. Communities were destabilized. The infrastructure of democratic expansion was shattered.

The Bipartisan Consensus: Clinton Normalizes What Nixon Started

Here’s where it gets critical: This didn’t stay a right-wing project.

The Clinton administration—facing its own political pressures, seeking to neutralize Republican attacks, convinced they were being “tough” and “realistic”—took Nixon’s infrastructure and expanded it, legitimized it, made it bipartisan common sense.

The 1994 Crime Bill:

• $9.7 billion in prison funding

• “Three strikes” mandatory life sentences

• Expanded death penalty to 60 offenses

• 100,000 new police officers

• Eliminated Pell Grants for incarcerated people (education as path out criminalized)

Clinton’s rhetoric matched the policy. “Superpredators.” “Gangs.” The racialized language wasn’t explicit—it didn’t have to be. Everyone knew who was being targeted.

This is crucial: When Democrats joined Republicans in building the carceral state, they made it impossible to challenge as partisan. They made it “just how things are.” They normalized the infrastructure.

And that infrastructure kept growing:

• Stop-and-frisk programs targeting Black and Latino men in cities across America

• Zero-tolerance policing

• School-to-prison pipeline

• Gang databases that criminalized association

• Broken windows policing that criminalized poverty

• Mass surveillance in Black and Brown neighborhoods

How This Built Authoritarian Infrastructure for Everyone

Here’s what many people miss: The tools built to repress Black communities don’t stay contained there.

When you give police the power to stop-and-frisk without probable cause, that power exists for use against anyone.

When you weaken Fourth Amendment protections, you weaken them for everyone.

When you build mass surveillance infrastructure, that infrastructure can be redirected.

When you normalize military equipment for police, those weapons can be turned on any community.

When you establish that “law enforcement” justifies otherwise illegal state action, that precedent applies beyond its original targets.

The infrastructure built for anti-Black repression became the infrastructure for authoritarian control of everyone.

Consider what we’ve normalized:

• Police can stop you without cause in certain neighborhoods

• Police can seize your assets without convicting you of a crime

• Police can use military weapons and tactics

• Police can conduct no-knock raids based on informant tips

• Surveillance cameras are everywhere, facial recognition is deployed, cell phone location tracking is routine

• Prosecutors can threaten you with decades in prison to force plea deals

• Conspiracy charges can criminalize association and organizing

• Being near a protest can get you charged with rioting

• Your social media posts are evidence

• Your friends list is a conspiracy network

Every single one of these was normalized first in Black communities, justified as necessary for “crime control,” built into standard police practice, and then available for deployment against anyone.

Stop-and-Frisk as the Opening for Far-Right Legal Strategy

Here’s where the legal architecture connects directly to current authoritarianism.

Stop-and-frisk programs—targeting Black and Latino men as presumptive criminals who could be stopped, searched, and detained without individualized suspicion—required eroding Fourth Amendment protections.

The legal justification: “High crime areas” + “furtive movements” + officer “experience” = reasonable suspicion.

In practice: Being Black or Brown in your own neighborhood = subject to police control.

But the Fourth Amendment erosion didn’t stay limited. Once you establish that:

• Police can act on “reasonable suspicion” below probable cause

• “High crime area” justifies enhanced suspicion

• Officer’s subjective assessment is enough

• Racial patterns don’t prove racial profiling without explicit statements of intent

You’ve created legal framework that:

• Makes it nearly impossible to prove racial profiling (absent recorded statements of explicit intent)

• Gives police enormous discretion for “investigative stops”

• Allows mass surveillance and control of targeted populations

• Requires almost no justification for state intrusion

This is the legal infrastructure far-right groups exploited. They used the weakened Fourth Amendment, the normalized police discretion, the accepted surveillance, the criminalization of protest, to:

• Infiltrate and monitor left-wing organizations

• Justify police violence against protesters

• Conduct warrantless surveillance

• Arrest organizers preemptively

• Use conspiracy charges against movements

The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers studied how police operated in Black neighborhoods and understood: those same tools could be turned on leftists, immigrants, Muslims, anyone.

And critically: Law enforcement supported this. Because police culture had spent forty years being trained that certain populations are inherently suspicious, inherently criminal, inherently threatening. That worldview—built on anti-Black racism—extends easily to immigrants, to Muslims, to protesters, to anyone challenging authority.

Trump’s “Law Enforcement” Framing Is the Direct Legacy

Now we arrive at the present moment, and the through-line becomes crystal clear.

When Trump bombs Venezuela and calls it a “law enforcement operation,” he’s using the exact infrastructure built over sixty years:

Legal infrastructure:

• “Law enforcement” justifies otherwise illegal state action (established in drug war)

• Courts defer to executive claims of law enforcement necessity (established in crime war jurisprudence)

• Enormous executive discretion in defining enforcement priorities (established in prosecutorial discretion)

• Weak Fourth Amendment protections (established through stop-and-frisk precedents)

• Inability to prove discriminatory intent without explicit statements (established in racial profiling cases)

Institutional infrastructure:

• Militarized police with military equipment and tactics (built for urban “crime control”)

• Surveillance systems and databases (built for gang/drug enforcement)

• Asset forfeiture funding mechanisms (built for drug war)

• Conspiracy charge frameworks (built to take down drug organizations)

• No-knock raid authority (built for drug enforcement)

Cultural infrastructure:

• “Law enforcement” as unquestionable justification (decades of normalization)

• Certain populations marked as inherently criminal (racialized suspicion)

• Police culture that sees certain people as threats requiring control (forty years of warrior cop training)

• Public acceptance of aggressive policing (normalized through “tough on crime”)

Political infrastructure:

• Bipartisan acceptance that “law enforcement” justifies extraordinary measures

• Political impossibility of criticizing police broadly

• “Law and order” as winning political message

• Criminal legal system as primary tool for social control

When Trump calls military action “law enforcement,” he’s standing on sixty years of infrastructure that says: law enforcement justifies things that would otherwise be illegal, courts defer to it, the public accepts it, and both parties support it.

And here’s the part that should terrify everyone: He’s right that the infrastructure exists. It does. We built it. Bipartisan. Over decades. Starting with the explicit goal of destroying Black political power and ending with the tools for destroying democracy itself.

Why the Current Silence on Race Is Dangerous

So when I see funders reducing anti-racism funding, organizations moving away from explicit race analysis, and public discussion of Trump’s authoritarianism that barely mentions race, I don’t see strategic repositioning. I see:

Historical amnesia: Forgetting how this infrastructure was built and why.

Analytical failure: Trying to understand authoritarianism while ignoring its foundation.

Strategic error: Thinking you can dismantle infrastructure without understanding how it was constructed.

Moral abdication: Abandoning the communities who have been resisting this authoritarianism for sixty years.

You cannot understand why courts defer to “law enforcement” claims without understanding how that deference was built through the drug war.

You cannot understand why police have military equipment without understanding urban “crime control.”

You cannot understand why surveillance is normalized without understanding gang databases and stop-and-frisk.

You cannot understand why protest is criminalized without understanding how that was done to Black organizing first.

You cannot understand why Trump can bomb a country and call it “law enforcement” without understanding how that framing was normalized domestically against Black communities.

The infrastructure of authoritarianism in America is built on anti-Black racism. Not just historically. Structurally. Currently.

What This Means for Resistance Strategy

If this analysis is correct—and I believe the evidence is overwhelming—then several things follow:

1. You Cannot Build Anti-Authoritarian Resistance While Abandoning Anti-Racism

The tools being used to build authoritarianism were designed for anti-Black repression. Black communities have been resisting these tools for sixty years. They have the experience, the analysis, the strategies, and the moral authority.

Any anti-authoritarian movement that doesn’t center the communities who have been fighting this longest is:

• Ignoring the people with the most expertise

• Abandoning natural allies

• Missing the structural analysis

• Repeating mistakes that Black organizers already learned from

You don’t have to use the same language. You don’t have to frame it the same way. But you cannot abandon the analysis.

2. The Infrastructure Must Be Dismantled, Not Just Resisted

It’s not enough to resist Trump’s use of “law enforcement” framing. The infrastructure that makes that framing work must be torn down:

• End qualified immunity

• Restrict police weaponry and tactics

• Dismantle surveillance systems

• Eliminate mandatory minimums

• End asset forfeiture

• Restore Fourth Amendment protections

• Demilitarize police

• End mass incarceration

• Restore voting rights

• Break police unions’ political power

This isn’t separate from fighting authoritarianism. This IS fighting authoritarianism. This is dismantling the infrastructure authoritarians are using.

3. Bipartisan Complicity Must Be Named

Democrats helped build this. Clinton especially, but also state and local Democrats who championed “tough on crime,” who funded police, who expanded surveillance, who supported stop-and-frisk.

You cannot dismantle this infrastructure with only partisan critique. You must be willing to name how both parties built this, how “bipartisan consensus” on crime normalized the tools of repression, how Democrats’ participation made this infrastructure seem neutral and inevitable rather than ideological and contested.

This is uncomfortable. But it’s necessary. Because as long as Democrats think they can use these tools “for good,” the tools remain available for authoritarians.

4. The Conversation About “Tone” and “Audience” Cannot Mean Abandoning Analysis

I agree we need to think carefully about tone, audience, and goals. I agree we need ideologically diverse coalitions for racial equity. I agree that the language of academic critical race theory doesn’t work for mass organizing.

But there’s a difference between:

• Changing tone while maintaining analysis (necessary)

• Abandoning analysis entirely (disaster)

You can talk about how “law enforcement” infrastructure threatens everyone’s freedom without using the word “systemic racism.”

You can organize diverse coalitions around dismantling police militarization without requiring everyone to adopt identical frameworks.

You can meet people where they are ideologically while still being clear about how this infrastructure was built and who it was built to target.

But you cannot—cannot—build effective resistance while pretending this infrastructure appeared from nowhere, serves no purpose, and has no racial logic.

The racial logic is the point. It’s why it was built. It’s why it persists. It’s how it works. It’s what makes it effective.

5. Black Leadership Isn’t “One Spring”—It’s Foundational to the River

In my springs-to-river framework, Black-led movements aren’t just one spring among many. They’re the communities with the longest experience fighting the infrastructure we all now face.

When Black organizers say “defund the police,” they’re not being radical—they’re naming what’s necessary to dismantle authoritarian infrastructure.

When Black communities resist surveillance, they’re protecting everyone.

When Black lawyers challenge qualified immunity, they’re fighting for everyone’s rights.

When Black-led movements demand accountability for police violence, they’re defending democracy itself.

Any river that doesn’t center these struggles, doesn’t learn from these communities, doesn’t follow Black leadership on these questions, is building resistance on sand.

The Choice We Face

We’re at a moment of choice, and the silence around race is one indicator.

Option 1: Historical Amnesia Pretend Trump’s authoritarianism is unprecedented, appeared from nowhere, has no foundation, requires no historical analysis. Focus on “defending democracy” without asking how democratic our institutions actually were, who they served, who they controlled. Build resistance that ignores the infrastructure’s origins and thus can’t effectively dismantle it.

Option 2: Strategic Clarity Name clearly: American authoritarianism is built on the infrastructure of anti-Black repression. That infrastructure was constructed deliberately over sixty years. It was bipartisan. It’s deeply embedded. And it cannot be dismantled without understanding how it was built, why it persists, and who has been fighting it longest.

I choose Option 2. Not because it’s easier. It’s harder. Not because it’s more popular. It’s not. But because it’s true, and because strategy built on lies fails.

The infrastructure Trump is using was built to destroy Black freedom. It’s now being used to destroy everyone’s freedom. You cannot resist it effectively without understanding that. And you cannot understand it while remaining silent about race.

The communities who have been fighting this longest deserve our attention, our resources, our solidarity, and our willingness to follow their lead. Not because of sentiment. Because of strategy.

Because they know how this works. Because they’ve been warning us for sixty years. Because they’re still here, still fighting, still organizing.

And because the river that defeats authoritarianism must be fed by the springs that have been resisting it longest.

The silence on race isn’t strategic repositioning. It’s forgetting how we got here and who’s been fighting all along.

We can’t afford that amnesia. Not now.