How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

In 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, protesting police brutality and racial inequality, spread to university campuses. Given that Black Lives Matter began in Ferguson, Missouri, it is no surprise that the first campus it touched was the University of Missouri. Concernedstudent1950 was the name of the Missouri student movement, named to evoke the year in which the University of Missouri was desegregated. Among its aims was to address the incidents of racial abuse that black students faced on a regular basis, as well as addressing curricula that represented culture and civilization as the product solely of white men. The media largely ignored these motivations and, representing protesting black students as an angry mob, used the situation as an opportunity to foment rage against the supposed liberal political excesses of the university.