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Brooke L Kimbrough
Professor Turner
AFAM: 3500:0001

We asked ten years ago.

We was asking with the Panthers. We was asking
with them, the Civil Rights Movement.
We was asking! Now those people that was asking
are dead or in jail.
So now what do you think we're gonna do?
Ask?

Tupac Shakur

The Black Plague: Why America cant quarantine our Rage

How many lynching, rapes, mutilations, and castrations does it take to screw in a
revolution? To echo the owl from the Tootsie Pop commercials; the world may never know.
The world may never know, not because the revolution just isnt coming, but because Black
Death is faceless, soulless, and almost always unknown. The anonymity in the death of Black
peoples, is one of many symptoms attached to the historical continuity of the position of the
Slave. Thousands of anonymous bodies in the abyss of the Atlantic ocean, floating meekly
towards the center of the earth. Bodies without stories, bodies without bones, bodies without
organs; not quite in the way our friends Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari might imagine, but
bodies whose organs have literally denigrated into nothingness along with the hopes from loved
ones that they are okay. Black Death, is a business. And business isnt personal. Strategically,
even Black people have been conditioned to accept their unnatural deaths as just how it is.
When as a collective, the lynchings in 1712, 1713, 1714, and 1715 feel as fresh as those in the

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21st century, the revolutionary is brewing. It is when the silent rapes of cocubinage feel as
violently real as that of which would happen to ones own body, that the revolution is definitely
underway. The revolution will have begun when the murders of Black Transwomen are mourned
and revered as adamantly as Black men. There are two tiers to understanding how Black people
build power; Pain is intrinsic to the theory of Blackness1, thats an old lesson. The second tier is
making anti-Black violence (which PRODUCES Black pain), a very personal offense. For 700
years of chattel slavery, colonialism, and apartheid has been met with the resistance. But as the
Tupac excerpt suggest, Black people will soon be done with asking. The Black Panther Party
(BPP) is viewed as the embodiment of the demanding to many. Though definitely not perfect,
and will not be romanticized as such, the BPP was so innovative between 1966-74 in terms of its
platform and policies, which prove to be a feasible instructional model for future Black
revolutionary organizations today. Though the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist,
patriarchal State successfully infiltrated the BPP, hundreds of more militantly Black
organizations filled its place. In this position paper, I will argue that ACTIVE, not reactive, Black
liberation efforts that are not set on integration into civil society will be a call for the end of the
world. This call is a lethal injection to the system of white supremacy that once released, will
never be contained again.

The Black Panther Party was the most successful Black Nationalist organization in
America. Created by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, CA. Many articles about the
BPP fall on a very superficial binary that either romanticizes them as a (mostly) perfect group, or
condemns them as a leftist group with no real organization in terms of political goals.2 There is
truth in both sides. The Panthers platform and ideologies were often very progressive, for the

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time period; though individual may have exhibited behaviours that were counterproductive it
didnt mean it was representative of indicative of the BPP as a whole. Kathleen Cleaver, a former
panther and a woman, remarked on the claims of the BPP as an incredibly sexist and patriarchal
institution;
It seems to me that part of the genesis of the gender question, this is only an
opinion, lies in the way it deflects attention from confronting the revolutionary
critique our organization made of the larger society, and turns it inward to look at
what type of dynamics and social conflicts characterized the organization. To me,
this discussion holds far less appeal than that which engages the means we
devised to struggle against the oppressive dynamics and social conflicts the larger
society imposed upon us.
What is often left uninterrogated is the unanimous knowing of the BPP as the symbol of Black
Male Patriarchy. Though grounded in some truth, Cleaver makes a poignant claim that reveals
the intensity of the white medias bias when she argues that the research on their organizations
intra-community conflicts is only a rhetorical trope to distract the masses from what really
matters. Its when interest convergence collides that certain voices are able to be visible to the
public eye but only when it is, usually covertly, for the elites.4 In this case, white supremacy
benefits from a miseducation on the Black Panthers that the majority of the public believes. So
newspapers and magazines would be willing to write article about the Panthers being sexist or
being homophobic under the guise of progressive claims about gender and sexual liberation, but
in reality it is just a conveniently divisive strategy. Whenever interests between the elites and the
disempowered populations collide, it is realistic to recognize it is only temporary. What may
seem useful today could be completely flipped on its head. It was convenient make the panthers

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a negative image against the popular culture ideas, like feminism.7 While it is important to take
into account the way interest convergence it also equally important to listen to the words of
survivors. Regina Jennings, a former panther, writes that Black men who she though were he
brothers, and comrade, were trying to sexually violate her.6 But to qualify that, the issues that
were publicized as structural problems within the organization were often cherry picked from
individual chapters.

Young Black people are always going to be leading Black liberation movements.
Oftentimes elders dont recognize the power and prowess of young people and what they can
offer. The Black Panthers sough to reach the street kids otherwise known as the lumpen
proletariat, which is the person between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. For students now, to
create a better BPP that has similar intentions, working to steal from the university in the best
way they know how.

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Work Cited
1

King, Martin L. "The Dilemma of Negro Americans." Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or

Community? New York: Harper & Row, 1967. 109-12. Print.

Carpini, Michael. "Black Panther Party: 1966-1982." University of Pennsylvania, 09 Jan. 2008.
Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Carpini, Michael. "Black Panther Party : 1966-1982." University of Pennsylvania, 09 Jan. 2008.

Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Cleaver, Kathleen Neal. "Women, Power, and Revolution." New Political Science 21.2 (1999):

231-36. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.

Harpalani, Vinay. "Simple Justice or Complex Injustice?: American Racial Dynamics and the

Ironies of Brown and Grutter"" Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education 3.1 (2004): n. pag.
Web. 7 Mar. 2015.

Lee, Cynthia. "Cultural Convergence: Interest Convergence Theory Meets the Cultural

Defense?" Arizona Law Review, Jan. 2007. Web. 07 May 2015.

Jennings, Regina. "Why I Joined the Party: An Africana Womanist Reflection." The Black

Panther Party (reconsidered). By Charles E. Jones. Baltimore: Black Classic, 1998. 257-65.
Print.

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7

Williams, Jakobi. ""Don't No Woman Have to Do Nothing She Don't Want to Do": Gender,

Activism, and the Illinois Black Panther Party." Black Women, Gender Families 6.2 (2012): 2954. Web. 1 Apr. 2015.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New

York: Minor Compositios, 2013. 26-28. Print.