Under Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels� direction, �anti-Semitic slurs appeared in Nazi newspapers, on posters, the movies, radio, in speeches by Hitler and top Nazis, and in the classroom� (The History Place). The target of the Nazis �smear campaign,� the Jews of Germany, noted the difference. Following the �smear campaign,� the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 announced Jews were no longer citizens of Germany (The History Place). We�ve all seen the photos and the films; we know what happened next.

For 400 years, plantations in the U.S. maintained the forced labor of captured Africans, who, on some large plantations, out-numbered the slaveholder, his family, and the overseers. Nonetheless, the �peculiar institution� managed to perpetuate the normalization of Black enslavement.

The Nazis discovered in the U.S. plantation a model system in which to pursue the Final Solution with as little objection from the world as possible.

As Professor Henry Giroux noted in �Threat of Authoritarianism: Politics Beyond Barack Obama� (Black Commentator), Americans reject the notion that fascism could happen here. American wouldn�t stand by while fellow citizens are persecuted and disenfranchised. Americans are different from their European counterparts. The genocide of indigenous people was different. African enslavement, too, was different.

In 1857, the Dred Scott vs. Sanford ruling agreed with the angry majority: Negroes, ex-slaved, Sambo and Mammy, had no rights that whites were bound to respect. The routing of Blacks from political offices and businesses was organized by the grassroots efforts of the KKK whose rank and file membership swelled with mayors, city officials, sheriffs, educators, community merchants, farmers, and every day people. The federal government complied with the demands of American citizens and segregation laws differentiated rapists and generally inferior people from among the general American public. The New Deal was fine - as long as it favored Americans - lifting the American population by its bootstraps throughout the Jim Crow era.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, exclusion became the order of the day - targeting Black Americans. COINTELPRO exterminated national and local Black agitators and militants. The dismantling of Affirmative Action targeted the Black Americans, inferior minds and inferior workers, who shouldn�t depend on government quotas. Affirmative Action excluded better qualified persons from opportunities. The dismantling of the welfare program targeted lazy Blacks, welfare queens, non-working mothers.

The uprising of the economically poor and disenfranchised urban Black population and the uttering of Black Power (similar to uttering Allah Akbar now, if you are Muslim) sent Americans to the polls, voting for law and order candidates, and supporting the end to government assistance to special interests groups, except, of course, such groups perceived as neutral - like the NRA, oil, pharmaceutical, health insurance, law enforcement, military to name a few. Only prison doors stood wide open to include - murderers, crack addicts, drug dealers, gangers, prostitutes,- criminals all unless proven innocent - that is, un-Black!

Black Americans encounter the appearance of nooses daily: the free market, trickle down theory, corporations are persons, colorblind, New Orleans� refugees living better than ever in the Superdome, the police shooting of certain unarmed citizens. Nooses dangle from public school buildings where teaching-to-tests and police control, offer the un-American the school-to-prison or fit-for-no-job options. Nooses are what the American Empire has always dangled before the enablers of and, at the same time, the threat to its hegemony. After the Bush administration�s forward progress of neo-conservatism, newly disenfranchised Americans have, once again, resorted to the noose.

The nooses target a particular racial group, a whole community or workers, unemployed, poor, men, women, and children. Nooses call out to Black Americans to take note of white anger. And we know what happens when whites, conservative and liberals, protected by racial privilege and law, are angry in the U.S. Black people get hurt, disenfranchised or, in other words, blacklisted, disappeared, killed.

Everyone knows the target of a noose, but in a post-racial era, Americans are trained to consider nooses one more prank (in a series of pranks), pranks not directed at them. After all, nothing like genocide, enslavement, or fascism can happen here!

So news of the display of a noose at the University of California San Diego isn�t news. What�s the big deal? Laugh!

If you (as a college student at UCSD) had received the Facebook invitation to a �Compton Cookout� to be held on campus, February 15, 2010, you would have received a set of instructions regarding attire:

Would you have laughed and prepared your �ghetto� attire? Or would the viewing of the invitation added one more humiliating experience to your repertory of insults?

Unfortunately, one too many students laughed and prepared their ghetto attire. One too many students associated with the Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity thought nothing of organizing this event. One too many of these students at UCSD thought nothing of insulting the Black Americans, let alone just over 300 fellow Black students. One too many white students at UCSD thought they would honor Black History Month, honor the memory of Malcolm X, observe the passing of poet Michelle Cliff by serving chicken and watermelon at the �Compton Cookout.� Instead, Steve Schmidt and Roger Shawley, Union-Tribune, write: �A student-run TV show subsequently ridiculed blacks and called them ungrateful for their reaction to the party, and used a racial slur.�

Before the �Compton Cookout� incident, Black students on the UCSD campus were treated as second-class citizens. According to Associate Professor Daniel Widener (UCSD), students of color are coming forth to describe what they experience on a daily bases at UCSD. Speaking on Democracy Now!, Widener recalls hearing from �a student who had trash thrown on her in the residence hall.�

We�ve had students intimidated in large lecture courses, where you may have four or five hundred students and may have one or two African Americans, at most� And we�ve had some off-campus incidents in restaurants and other public spaces.

�It�s just a very hostile environment for African American students and underrepresented students on an everyday basis in the previous years,� added Fnann Keflezighi, co-chair of the UC San Diego Black Student Union.

It would seem that despite the urging of those like President Obama the so-called post-racial era functions similarly to the era of slavery or the era of fascism (these long-gone-eras). Professor Widener notes California�s backlash initiatives and laws to re-segregated people of color:

But this racial backlash is not limited to the state of California!

The Nuremberg Laws are not being implemented all at once here. The removal of Affirmative Action and the series of Clinton administration�s please-the-neo-con-capitalists laws, and the terrorist security measures have worked to normalize racial segregation and violence against people of color in the post-racial era. Americans in the larger community, already eager to deny racism, register these assaults on Black, Red, and Brown people as nothing more than �a few bad racist apples.� Nothing unusual is specifically happening to Black Americans: Everyone has been subject to a loss of their civil liberties! The Nazis commenced the Final Solution with a few signs, a few incidents of taunting of individual Jew, a few removals of Jewish neighbors, firing of workers at workplaces - a few students and faculty at the universities disappeared. In the U.S., a few people spoke of indigenous people as savages and a few traders wrote home referring to inferior creatures. The few incidents by a few bad racists have yet to end!

If Black faculty experienced an atmosphere of academic freedom (at UCSD and other campuses throughout the U.S.) they would be able to educate students on how and why prison and Jezebel (slavery) attire became marketable to Blacks in the U.S. Black faculty, in an atmosphere not hostile to Blackness, would have educated students on how and why hair weaves, cheap or expensive, points more to a sick premise of white supremacy that forces racial difference to participate in erasing itself, erasing the natural variation of hair texture, nose shape, eye color, and skin color. A Black faculty free to challenge would ask why is it that a segment of the Black population has come to hate itself, its, culture, and its heritage? What is behind this change in Black Americans? A Red, Black, or Brown professor allowed to be Red, Black, and Brown, would have assigned the reading of Howard Zinn�s A People's History of the United States so white students have a liberating experience: a confrontation with their unfiltered history.

If students, of all races, weren�t forced into adopted the role of clients, pursuing the big money-job rather than students, citizens of the world, they would organize not a divide and conquer �Cookout� but literacy workshops to assists residents of Compton who were betrayed, demoralized, and mis-educated in the U.S. public schools. Instead, some white college students at UCSD and others throughout the U.S. have come to believe it�s normal to practice racism and shout: What�s the big deal?

Who is sending the message to these students that it�s normal to engage in terrorism? Who has taught them, no different apparently from those white children during slavery or during Jim Crow, to see themselves as privileged, entitled to mock and even threaten Black Americans? Who demonized and criminalized Black people with the intent to prohibit their mobility in the U.S.?

So when the noose is found hanging on February 25, 2010 in a bookcase at Geisel Library (UCSD), the administration at UCSD hesitates to respond: What few bad apples are drawing media attention to the norm? The Black Student Union, students of color, and faculty had to storm the Bastille (the Chancellor�s Office) to receive any condemnation of these events. Finally the Chancellor Marye Anne Fox issues this letter on March 1, 2010:

Our campus and community have been deeply hurt. Neo-liberal bleach: the campus and the community weren�t the target of racism! The trash thrown at a student wasn�t thrown at a white student! The perpetrators were not outside the �campus and community�!

And it�s going to take action and time to heal the pain.

Time, again! Americans need more time! Over 200 years isn�t enough time? Is Chancellor Fox echoing the NAACP�s Benjamin Todd Jealous: �This isn�t the time?� Are both of these elite figures, Fox and Jealous, woman and Black, serving as collaborators?

Whose pain is Chancellor Fox referring to? Is it the pain experienced by Red, Black, and Brown faculty and students, the target of this smear campaign? Is the pain Chancellor Fox refers to the same pain experienced by her, white faculty and students at UCSD?

Heal the pain!

On March 4, 2010, a KKK hood is found on the UCSD campus!

Heal the pain!

That means business as usual with white administrators dusting off the healing program and the diversity series, complete with guest lecturers ending their talk on oneness on our wonderful campus, in our wonderful country with the singing of Kumbayah. At the end of these farcical events, Chancellor Fox and the organizers will congratulate themselves for presenting to the American public another staged assault on people of color in the U.S.

I�m reminded of a liberal, young white chairwoman, at a faculty meeting, hysterically telling the white faculty that I was attempting to �bringing in that Black feminism!� I was attempting to respond by adding a Black perspective to what I believed was a conversation regarding race. Now, that was bad to become visible while Black in 2004. It�s certainly not good to still attempt to be visible in 2010! In fact, it�s worse!

The Chancellor Fox�s letter rejects an admission of racism and most important, of white supremacy. And you wonder why the perpetrators of these racist incidents know they are able to escape the noose? Chancellor Fox can�t say racism; she can�t point to white student perpetrators; she can�t acknowledge the target of what the campus will not tolerate - but similar to every other institution in the U.S. has very much tolerated and depended upon for the survival of white supremacy in this nation-state.

�Westerners,� writes Dr. Charles W. Mills in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, �created race in the first place, by demarcating themselves from other �races,� brining into existence a world with two poles [white and non-white] so it is doubly ironic that they should feign a hands-washing ignorance of these realities.� No matter what Chancellor Fox says now regarding these incidents, she, the Regents, and the administrative staff have behaved as if the racial make-up of faculty and students at UCSD is normal for a State university. So Chancellor Fox is now surprised to discover an intolerable situation. The limited presence of faculty and students of color at UCSD (and at other State universities throughout the U.S.) should be intolerable - but for the need to retain white supremacy!

Oh, but that�s so 60�s? Can you hear those not targeted by racism?

This isn�t the time - isn�t that right Jealous, President of the NAACP!

You should support women! The chancellor is a woman!

I�m sure Chancellor Anne Fox is from a family of hard workers. Sixties feminism (if not familial advantages) permitted her the opportunity to achieve much and become a woman chancellor at a university. Affirmative Action, at least in theory, seems to have benefited Chancellor Fox and many women whose racial affinity to those in power allowed these women to step up and sit at the right and left hand of white men - fathers, husbands, uncles, sons.

In response to the noose, Vice Chancellor Gary Matthews said: �It�s someone who didn�t think that leaving a noose was an issue.� Oh, just a mistake! The student just didn�t know. What? What�s the big deal?

It remains to be seen what the woman chancellor will do to make the atmosphere one that is open and accepting of people of color being themselves - Red, Black, and Brown - and not some �comfortable� Tom or Jane just to survive. But this is America. So as another liberal white chair of African American Studies said to me: Don�t expect it to change soon! Tolerate it! �Adjust,� as another administrator told me, �or else?� Or else? Or die?

It can happen here because it�s happening!

The effort of the terrorists at UCSD is to cleanse the campus of its low presence of Black students. The perpetrators, carrying out the hegemony�s agenda, know they can count on an administration (as most universities) submissive to government and corporate funding. So announce an investigation and then wait. Down the road, in the back pages of newspapers, we�ll read that the investigation found no one responsible, or a few bad apples were responsible or the incidents won�t be classified as �hate crimes.�

Perpetrators, innocent young white students, can count on the silence of their families, communities, white America.

But the Black students at UCSD are staying on campus; they are fighting back! They are fighting, they say, for the right of Blacks to become doctors and lawyers. Well, I can see a good many administrators and professors joining with the corporate, police State, �cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities�smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces.� This is the intolerable force of hate that has long reneged on its humanity.

What�s new or not fascist in this situation?

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.