A Communist Fascist?

I lecture at a rural southern school and sometimes my experiences should be videotaped and presented on the surreal life t.v. show. It is unbelievable what some of the students at this very conservative school come up with. Last week I lectured on Reconstruction and the "Romance of Reunion." Historian Eric Foner criticizes Ken Burns and his civil war documentary because it does not consider the legacy of reconstruction or racial justice. I spent a whole hour and 15 minutes discussing Foner and Burns and concluded that the south "won" the peace because after Reconstruction southern and northern whites "reunified" at the expense of racial justice and black civil rights. As evidence: the southern states elected ex-confederate/neo-democrat politicians to congress who actively worked to oppress freedmen. Georgia, for example, elected Alexander Stephens....the vp of the csa. One of my students asked why this was a problem? He further commented that if the federal government refused to recognize the senator from georgia, then the federal government would be trampling on democracy for refusing to accept the democratically elected representative. When I pointed out that the people of georgia trampled on democracy by refusing to allow blacks the right to vote, the grumbling began.

Today I was lecturing on W.E.B. DuBois and The Souls of Black Folk. I was pointing out the criticism that DuBois had made in regards to Booker T. Washington's materialism thesis and the compromise in his famous Atlanta speech of 1906 in which Washington exchanged access to the marketplace at the expense of pursuing civil rights, political rights, and education for black youths. DuBois claimed that a Talented Tenth of liberal arts trained blacks should train themselves to lead a progressive gradual march to civil rights because materialism in and of itself simply did not work. A student commented that DuBois was wrong because "every economist in the world" knows that a vertical economy (capitalism) will integrate lower class people into an expanding middle class. When I pointed out that DuBois claimed that this could not happen because the economic capitalist system was dominated by whites and the whites had made laws that prohibted black upward socio-economic mobility, the student resorted to slander. He called DuBois a "Communist and a Fascist who supported Hitler, anti-semitism, and the Holocaust in Germany." My jaw dropped. I responded, firstly communists and fascists are two different things. I continued to say that DuBois never supported anti-semitism or the holocaust or fascism. The student claimed that he had documents to prove DuBois was anti-semitic....he failed to produce them. Anyway it turns out that DuBois had made two sterotypical remarks toward two jewish individuals earlier in his career but condemned anti-semitic behavior consistently throughout his career. He used Jewish intellectualism found in the Zionist movement to craft a pan-African ideology and he chastized nazi germany for its treatment of the Jews. He even commemorated the warsaw ghetto uprising and compared the struggle of the Jewish people to the struggle of African Americans in the United States. When I reminded the student that any vertical economic system...particularly capitalism.....always places someone at the bottom....and in the United States those at the bottom have been African Americans while whites created laws to keep them there throughout the centuries, the student finally ceased his onslaught of DuBois. I never even got to present to the students that both DuBois and Washington's models completely failed. DuBois became so disillusioned with the failure of progressivism and civil rights that he became a communist and moved to Ghana where he died in 1963.

What the hell? Where do these kids get these ideas? How the hell can you be a Communist Fascist? I am guessing that the student has been indoctrinated by the economics department at this school which is infamously ultra-conservative (and word on the street is that much of the faculty are also closet racists). This would explain where this student got his ideas. It was beyond belief and really quite distressing. Is this an example of how the academic world is moving away from criticism and in the direction of farce? Students are not only using the Patriot Act to legitimize internment camps for Japanese-Americans they now are using economic theory to impose an economic prison on those at the bottom of the vertical scale? I am sure that this university is anything but representative of the larger population but these ideas based on hyperbolic fiction presented as fact is becomeing way to common.