Panthers, doom scrolling and taking back power.
’10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.’
- from The Black Panther Party “What We Want Now!” Ten-Point Program, published May 1967.
I spent this past strange summer suffering more than usual from social media fatigue. I tried to institute a no phone after dinner rule that digressed into no phone in bed before it fell apart completely. I tried removing the icons from my home screen but my brain was so desperate for its pathetic little hits of dopamine that it sent out muscle memory signals straight to my thumbs every time I picked up my phone. Ultimately my efforts were futile, my weak will unable to contend with all that my phone has become in the time of Our Virus: my news source, my social life and my portal to the world.
No matter how many mouth-frothing right wingers I hate stalk on Instagram I know that I’m trapped in an echo chamber and I can tell which echo chamber I’m in by the well-meaning infographics that appear in luminescent pink rings at the top of my feed. At first I found them interesting, helpful even, but there are only a certain number of times a person can be instructed to do better whilst clicking through hundreds of identical tastefully designed squares. I really hope that people do find ways to do better as a result of this particular brand of online activism but all it made me do was purge my phone of apps for days at a time just to get a break. It’s not as if disengaging from social media made me any less aware of the shit show going on in the world around me. If anything, having my head out of my phone for a few days helped me process the ongoing inferno of 2020 without disappearing into a spiral of shame and fear.
It was during the rounds of antiracist reading lists, particularly the controversial inclusion and quick removal of the book White Fragility by white academic and big-money corporate ‘diversity trainer’ Robin DiAngelo that I decided I would be better off actually reading something, as opposed to reading about what I should be reading according to something reposted into circular oblivion on the internet. I started with Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries. First published in 1993, Still Black, Still Strong is an oral history of the Black Panther Party and the FBI’s deeply racist Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that targeted them. Headed by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO was a series of extrajudicial assassinations and covert destabilising tactics used to ‘neutralize’ the Black Panthers (the term used by the Bureau), which eventually led to their breakdown in the late 1970s. Through a series of interviews, essays and legal statements written by exiled and incarcerated Panthers Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur, Still Black, Still Strong presents a radical and uncensored account of a moment in American history that has otherwise been distorted or deliberately pushed out of collective memory.
Before reading Still Black, Still Strong my knowledge of the Panthers mostly came from the assimilation of their radical aesthetic and its subsequent trickle down into pop culture. I knew about the berets, natural hair and raised fists, probably from television – though I can’t place where. In 2017 the TATE Modern hosted an exhibition called Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power where I saw a display of the Black Panther Party Newspaper, also know as The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, an internationally distributed mouthpiece and critical tool in the party’s consciousness raising and community organisation programmes. The fact that the cartoonish representations of the Panthers that I absorbed through some kind of late ‘90s TV osmosis omitted any information about the party’s hugely successful community programmes is a direct result of the way in which COINTELPRO brutally sabotaged their efforts.
Still Black, Still Strong opens with an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad, leader of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party. Bin Wahad speaks from prison, where he was held for nineteen years on a legal technicality after his arrest as part of COINTELPRO. His efforts to appeal were rebuffed as a result of the US government illegally withholding state’s evidence necessary for his case. Bin Wahad explains the motives that led to the COINTELPRO attacks: ‘Political education and the development of political awareness was one of the main goals of the Black Panther Party. In fact the BPP never posed a serious military threat to the US government. It was the popularity of our 10 point program, our belief in the guaranteed right of everyone to food, clothing, decent housing, free health care, education, etcetera, that terrified the government and motivated them to launch an all-out attack against us.’
Initiated at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland, California in 1969 the Panthers’ Free Breakfast For School Children programme, at the height of its success, went on to feed up to 10,000 children every day before they went to school. The Panthers’ radical social programme provided for Black and working class communities that the state had abandoned, highlighting the racialised violence of government neglect. Hoover’s FBI retaliated through a combination of raids and targeted harassment on Free Breakfast venues and proprietors, threatening closure, cuts to funding and even incarceration for its facilitators. The Free Breakfast programme was eventually quashed by a racist state that had no intention of feeding hungry children themselves, but as a symbolic stripping of power from others in order to bolster their own cruel and hollow supremacist ideology.
The vilification of Black people in America and the fabrication of a domestic terrorist underclass by the state and so-called ‘independent’ media in order to distract from the true horrors inflicted upon the world by a succession of power grabbing, corporation serving governments has not by any means gone away. Among the many Panthers targeted by COINTELPRO perhaps one of the most high profile is Assata Shakur, who remains in exile in Cuba to this day after her escape from Clinton Correctional Facility For Women where she was serving a life sentence in 1979. In a testimony at the end of Still Black, Still Strong, Shakur speaks out about her ongoing vilification by the racist press and the impact that had on the outcome of her trial: ‘I was turned into a monster. They pictured this vicious woman that goes around terrorising police, this madwoman essentially…They had created this whole mythology in order to destroy me.’ The Black Power movement itself came up against the same fate as Shakur.
I started working on this newsletter on the same morning that a grand jury, by some reality-swerving linguistic legal loophole, decided that the police officers who murdered 26 year old hospital worker Breonna Taylor were not going to face justice. I suppose it’s the only outcome we can expect from a violent state apparatus whose motive was to contain and ‘neutralize’ the Black population – a system that history has shown us is beyond reform. Of course I was horrified at the news, but I wasn’t surprised. I went through the motions of double-clicking endless infographics and posts calling for justice alongside smiling portraits of Breonna, each one a well-meaning attempt to fill the void left by her death. I signed petitions and sent money but ultimately felt powerless. Despite the optics of progress, the system that trampled the Black Panthers is the same system that refuses to take responsibility for the murder of Black people at the hands of an institutionally racist police force.
History is a weapon. It’s why the UK government recently ruled against schools teaching the rich history of the successful workers movements that gave us (among other things) the weekend and outlawing child labour. The risk of raising a generation armed with race and class-consciousness is too dangerous for a system that relies on weak and divided populations for its planet-sacrificing exponential growth. It might not be as effective and immediate as direct action, but reading the history of radical movements is more helpful than scrolling through Instagram, especially as a white person. Learning where and how to find these cracks in the public memory is its own reward, but there’s no shortage of reading lists online if you need one. Radical movements are repressed and forgotten in order to maintain the violent status quo that has led us into the inferno we’re now beginning to face. Their histories reminds us that there have always been and always will be alternatives to fight for.
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