Transgressing to teach: Theorising race and security through struggle

Recent interventions in critical security studies have argued that the field has struggled to account for the racialised/racist foundations of security politics. This article engages with the US Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that the Party did important work to show how security politics is dependent on racial violence. The idea that we can theorise global politics through struggle (`struggle as method’) is becoming popular within disciplinary International Relations (IR), but has longer lineages in Black radical thought. The BPP were important advocates of struggle as method, with tactics and strategies intentionally designed with a pedagogical purpose; through Panther actions (including community self-defence and survival programmes), and the state’s response to these, the mechanisms of capitalist white supremacy were laid bare. The article therefore acknowledges BPP action as a series of theoretical interventions, which demonstrated how the terms of US/white security are rooted in and dependent on anti-Blackness. It also shows how Panther tactics prefigured alternative, radical, anti-statist approaches to security, these conceptualised as `survival pending revolution’. The article closes by arguing that scholarship on critical security studies - especially as related to the racialised politics of security - should do more to work with and acknowledge its indebtedness to struggle as method.

Photo Essay: Bringing Acupuncture to the People

This photo essay examines key events in the career of physician-activist Tolbert Small, a doctor for the Black Panther Party and one of the first American doctors to practice acupuncture. It features the historic 1972 Black Panther Party delegation to China where Small first learned about acupuncture, as well as the Harriet Tubman Medical Office where he incorporated acupuncture into his practice.

Reflections on (Re)making History

Who and what makes history? This essay describes how physician-activist Tolbert Small (b. 1942) has been collecting, preserving, and recording his own history, as well as of those around him. Small has been practicing medicine in California’s San Francisco Bay Area since 1968, serving a diversity of patients: from thousands of community members to revolutionaries such as Angela Davis and George Jackson. A physician for the Black Panther Party from 1970 to 1974, Small joined the party’s 1972 delegation to China, where he witnessed acupuncture. He then integrated the practice into his medical toolkit upon returning home. Small’s personal archives document an important chapter of American social and medical history. His stories, along with those of the revolutionaries who introduced acupuncture into New York City’s Lincoln Detox Center during the 1970s, ask us to revisit conventional historical narratives as well as the way in which acupuncture history is made.

Acupuncture, the Black Panther Party, and People’s Medicine

Tolbert Small (b. 1943) is a physician and civil rights activist best known for his advocacy for research on sickle cell anemia. In the summer of 2020 two of Asian Medicine’s editors, Daniel Burton-Rose and Yi-Li Wu, interviewed Small about his clinical career of more than fifty years. The interview focuses on Small’s experience with acupuncture, the practice of Chinese medicine in the United States, and his commitment to social justice. Small was introduced to acupuncture in 1972 as a member of a delegation of the Black Panther Party to the People’s Republic of China, and he incorporated it into his clinical practice upon his return to Oakland, California. Small began practicing acupuncture at a time when instructional materials and therapeutic implements were difficult to obtain. He witnessed the gradual mainstreaming of Chinese medicine in the United States, accompanied by problems of differential access based on race and income.

Huey Newton’s Lessons for the Academic Left

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.

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

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.