scholarly journals Huey Newton’s Lessons for the Academic Left

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110392
Author(s):  
Jim Vernon
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Progressive Change ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
Black Panther

The Black Panther Party was founded to bridge the radical theorizing that swept college campuses in the mid-1960s and the lumpen proletariat abandoned by the so-called ‘Great Society’. However, shortly thereafter, Newton began to harshly criticize the academic Left in general for their drive to find ‘a set of actions and a set of principles that are easy to identify and are absolute.’ This article reconstructs Newton’s critique of progressive movements grounded primarily in academic debates, as well as his conception of vanguard political theory. Newton’s grasp of revolution as a gradual, open, and above all dialectical process, not only provides a corrective to many dominant academic accounts of the nature of progressive change but, more importantly, it also grounds an emancipatory philosophy that can direct collective struggle, precisely because it remains grounded in the imperfect and internally conflicted lives of those whose freedom is to be won through it.

scholarly journals Resisting racial militarism: War, policing and the Black Panther Party

2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062199722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nivi Manchanda ◽  
Chris Rossdale
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Liberal Societies ◽  
Police Action ◽  
Black Panther

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.

Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Gun Carrying ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hero Archetype ◽  
Gun Culture ◽  
Black Panther

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.

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