We can never forget that almost all totalitarian orders begin as youth movements disgusted by nearly everything in the established order

From The All-American Skin Game, or Decoy of Race by Stanley Crouch

All of these muddling democratic phenomena in the United States make it very clear why we in the Americas cannot be intimidated by resentment from the bottom to the top, the top to the bottom. The corruptions of protest shouldn’t make it impossible for us to assert the sophistication necessary to utilize the double-edged sword of accurate assessment. Nor should we be bullied by those who claim that we can only protect our civilization by excluding those at the bottom. History teaches us—over and over and over—that no community, young or old, is immune to the hopped-up irrationalities of scapegoating. We can never forget that almost all totalitarian orders begin as youth movements disgusted by nearly everything in the established order and impatient with the slow, difficult processes of actual human development within the context of individual liberty under the rule of law. It can never be said too often that the “temples of light,” the pageantry, and the mindless incantation of Adolf Hitler made him the first rock star and perhaps the first gangster rapper as well. Appeals to resentment, alienation, separatist “authenticity,” and tribal paranoia always seek to manipulate the anti-intellectual adolescent within all of us, regardless of our ages. We must also remember that the expedient reassertion of tradition—the return to former glory that has been betrayed by the decadent and perverse among us—is also one of the promises made by those who may have little interest in the exhausting processes of democracy. Such appeals and promises, one and all, produce old and rusty or new and polished lines of iron suits, whether they come from the top or the bottom, the bottom or the top.

We can most effectively move in the direction of melting down the iron suits of history by celebrating the fundamental vitality and policy implications of one charismatic fact: our multiple miscegenations don’t imprison us in any of the many varieties of resentment and paranoia if we truly understand them. They supply our democratic liberation through the enrichments of identity. We can no longer afford to traffic in simple-minded and culturally inaccurate terms like “black” and “white” if they are meant to tell us anything more than loose descriptions of skin tone. We are the results of every human possibility that has touched us, no matter its point of origin. As people of the Americas, we rise up from a gumbo in which, after a certain time, it is sometimes very difficult to tell one ingredient from another. All of those ingredients, however, give a more delectable taste to the brew.