How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

In 1896, Frederick L. Hoffman published the book Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad describes as “arguably the most influential race and crime study of the first half of the twentieth century.” Its thesis is that black Americans are uniquely violent, lazy, and prone to disease. In 1996, William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters published the book Body Count: Moral Poverty…and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. Its thesis is that America faces a unique threat from a new generation of young men, a large percentage of whom are black, who are especially prone to cruel, violent acts and incapable of honest work; these young men they call “super-predators.” The book warns of a coming wave of youth violence by these “super-predators” (the wave of course did not materialize; violent crime plummeted in subsequent years, rather than sharply rising). These two works bookend a century of pseudoscience forging a link in the American consciousness between criminality and Americans who descended from enslaved Africans. Despite the century-long gap between them, the two books are remarkably similar: Both employ the sober language of statistics to raise moral panic about a coming wave of racialized violence (Body Count, unlike Hoffman’s book, grounds its false predictions in claims about the “moral poverty” of “inner-city culture,” rather than genetics).