This year marks the 75th anniversary of the initial publication of Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, and as I reread it this past week, I kept thinking about its continued relevance today, especially during 2024, a year which, and I do not feel this is hyperbole, carries within it a huge deal of historical significance for the United States and our democratic experiment. Countless others have said the same thing, but as I sit here, in late January and think ahead to November, I cannot help but think about what will happen come election day, no matter the legitimate outcome. I sit here days after the Iowa caucuses where an authoritarian demagogue won with 51% of the vote. I could argue that Iowa isn’t a bell weather, considering only 110,000 voters caucused, accounting for under 15% of Iowa’s 752,000 registered Republicans. However, it is telling that over 55,000 of those who caucused did so for a candidate who said he would only be a dictator on day one and challenged Adolf Hitler and Nazis by saying he faces internal enemies that he labels as “vermin” while others did so for candidates that said they would send troops into Mexico to solve the border crisis or claimed that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War or that the United States has never been a racist nation.

Over the past few years, I have read multiple books, listened to multiple podcasts, and watched multiple documentaries about how we’ve gotten to this point and the similarities to other definitive moments in history. I’ve read Bradley Onishi, Chris Hedges, Anthea Butler, Robert P. Jones, Kristin Kobes du Mez, Eddie Glaude, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Jeff Sharlet, and countless others. I’ve read all of this and I keep coming back to Lillian Smith and Killers of the Dream, a memoir she wrote in 1949, a memoir where she examined herself and the impacts of white supremacy and authoritarianism in the South on herself and whites. While some may view the psychoanalytical bent as problematic, her core arguments about the psychosis of white supremacy and authoritarianism hold true. Her words, written 75 years ago, hold importance at this moment in 2024 as we careen towards the future, unsure of what will transpire.

In Killers of the Dream, Smith lays out the psychosis of whiteness that leads to authoritarianism. She points out, again and again, how politicians and those in power wield words to cozy up to potential voters. They do so by playing, first and foremost, upon the populace’s fears. These fears can be anything from science and intellectual curiosity to individuals such as African Americans, immigrants, or others who do not fit whiteness. Even though the politicians and powerful exploit the white populace, denying them healthcare, educational opportunities, social safety nets, and . . . they whip the populace up into a frenzy through the phenotypical link of whiteness, through the bargain, as Smith allegorically points out, between Mr. Rich White and Mr. Poor White.

Mr. Rich White “did nothing about staved minds and bodies, nothing about health and jobs.” Instead, they gave the keys over to Mr. Poor White, allowing raise hell. Mr. Poor White “threw the books out of libraries and tore up magazines whenever he didn’t like what was in them. And sometimes just because he could not read or write . . . He decided when something could or couldn’t be taught, whenever he wanted to.” Along with education, Mr. Poor White “decided on folks’ morals: when they could drink liquor and when they couldn’t, how they must treat their wives, what they could say about sex and God and science and country and the Negro — and how they could say it; and the manners they could use towards other people.” Does any of this sound familiar? Does it sound like book challenges and bans? Does it sound like legislation against women’s rights to their own bodies? Does it sound like legislation against LGBTQ individuals? Does it sound familiar?

When someone would spark Mr. Poor White and lead him to see how Mr. Rich White manipulated him, Mr. Rich White would blame everything “on the damyankee and the New Deal and the Communist and Mrs. Roosevelt and the Negro press and the social scientists and that little fellow in India and southern traitors and a crazy world that won’t stop shrinking.” The language would turn, and Mr. Rich White or the politician or the demagogue would claim that anything Woke, anything connected with DEI, anything teaching actual, factual history would be from communists, from Russia, from China, a ploy to undermine democracy when, in reality, they are the ones undermining democracy and calling for an authoritarian regime where only those they deem “loyal” can vote and have a sway in the decision making process.

The flipping of language benefits demagogues and authoritarians because it deploys rhetoric not on the basis of fact and on the ways that people act but as a dog whistle that dehumanizes individuals through the use of terms heavily laden with symbolic meanings and connotations that pull, ruggedly, on one’s psyche. Writing about how hard it is “for the rural white to believe that the southern liberals who champion their rights are not ‘Communists,’” Smith points out that the use of language from the mouths and pens of these power-hungry politicians blind the “rural white” to individuals who “work for higher wages,” “defend human rights,” “oppose war and segregation,” “believe in co-operatives and freedom of conscience,” and “fight authoritarianism.”

This rhetorical turn serves to foment anger and hatred but it also serves as a means of providing a false shield for one’s self, pushing the violence and hatred sparked by it outward, ignoring the impact it has on the individual. Discussing how Southern politicians and the wealthy dehumanized Blacks, Smith notes that this move harms those who buy into it. She states, “And sometimes it was like this: If you once let yourself believe he is human, then you’d have to admit you’d done things to him you can’t admit you’ve done to a human.” Does this not sound familiar? Does it not sound like rhetoric not just surrounding political opposition but also immigrants? What does this realization do to people who tweet, gleefully, about the deaths of migrants crossing the Rio Grande while law enforcement stand on the banks?

The mirror, a running thread throughout Smith’s memoir, can blind us. It can cause us to either gaze intently into it or turn away, revolted by what we see within ourselves. Those who spew hate to get votes, who express authoritarianism, who lean into fascism, know that we have these two choices when confronted with our reactions to their red meat. They hope we choose the latter, turning back towards the bully pulpit, rejecting any confrontation with the ghastly image that stares back at us, condemning us. For democracy to survive, and to stave off authoritarian aggression, we must confront ourselves. We must come to terms with ourselves. We must, as Diane Roberts points out in Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence, “get a grip” on what our past has done to us as individuals and as a collective.

Smith points out that we substituted material things for “human relationships,” and as we gazed at our reflections, “[w]e felt ourselves shrinking as we looked — and we could not endure the sight.” We realize we are not all we believe. We see ourselves for what we are. That could be seeing ourselves as superior to others based on phenotype, class, or other factors, or as someone knowledgeable about the past, science, and reality and as someone who will fight for democracy, realizing our own shortcomings and willing to confront ourselves. Smith, Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless others call white supremacy and its roots a disease, a cancer, as Smith argues, that metastasizes and multiples. The psychic cancer will not remove itself willingly. If it gets eradicated in one section, it will spread to another. It will morph. It will adapt.

One need only think of how Southern politicians had no issue using blatant racism to win an election and then Lee Atwater, who worked in Ronald Reagan’s administration, saying that the language must change because in 1954 a politician could say “n*****” but today the language must be coded in “bussing,” “states’ rights,” or other terms, thus “subconsciously” getting out the constructed fears used to whip up Mr. Poor White and his votes.

Instead of killing our dream in 2024, instead of killing our democracy, instead of succumbing to authoritarianism and white supremacy, we must hope. We must work. Smith ends Killers of the Dream on a hopeful note. She tells us, “So we stand: tied to the past and clutching at the stars!” To grab those stars, we must act, we must have the desire to change the trajectory. She points out that we have done this work before, and since the expanded republication of Killers of the Dream in 1961 as part of the Civil Rights Movement, we have done it since. “We have the means,” Smith states, “the technics, we have the knowledge, the insight and courage.” But, she asks, “Do we have the desire?” Each of us must answer this question. Each of us must ask ourselves if we will stare at our reflection, no matter what the reflection reveals about us, or if we will turn on our heels and goose step back towards the ever-expanding, yawning chasm that awaits us if we refuse to confront our sins.