Harry Targ
O,
yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
(From Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,”
1938)
Fifty years ago, in 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby
Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The Party inspired
African American and white leftists who were beginning to see capitalist
exploitation and racism as central to the American experience. The BPP saw the
need for Black people to organize to defend their communities; to develop a
theory that would help Black people understand their subordinate condition; to
construct institutions, particularly health care, education, and food distribution,
to serve the people; and to act in solidarity with liberation struggles on a
worldwide basis. To articulate its goals the BPP wrote a 10-point program that
would serve as a guide to programs and action for party members
(collectiveliberation.org).
The BPP program included demands for community
control, access to “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and
peace,” and an end to police violence and mass incarceration of Black people. In
each issue of The Black Panther newspaper,
all 537 of them, the platform was printed. The dramatic escalation of state
violence against the BPP and the Black community in general by the FBI and
local law enforcement agencies testified to the fact that the Panther program
resonated in urban communities around the country, particularly among the
young.
The Party encouraged grassroots activism and
community control basing its appeal on the idea that it would serve the needs
of the people. Establishing free breakfast programs for children, health
clinics, and education, had enormous appeal. And with growing violence against
the community by the police the BPP advocated collective self-defense.
Fifty years later a new movement, Black Lives
Matter, has emerged to address the unfulfilled dreams articulated in the BPP
vision. The immediate impetus for BLM, as with the BPP, was defense against
state violence. Mass incarceration, criminalization, indiscriminant police
killings, creating police occupation armies with high technology weapons, and
growing economic devastation of whole communities in 2016 very much parallels
the racism that motivated Newton and Seale to pick up the pen and the gun in
1966. Economic inequality; massive poverty; lack of access to quality
education, healthcare, housing, transportation; and political marginalization
plague African Americans today almost as much as was the case fifty years ago.
Black Lives Matter issued a detailed platform on
August 1, 2016 resulting from the deliberations of at least 50 organizations whose
membership includes thousands of Black people around the country. It comes at a
time when the visible incidences of police violence have been experienced
everywhere and young women and men have been hitting the streets expressing
their outrage. The capsule summary of “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands
for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice” includes six core demands (The Movement
for Black Lives, Portside, August 4,
2016; the BLM website is policy.m4bl.org):
End
the war on Black people
Reparations
Invest-Divest
Economic
Justice
Community
Control
Political
Power
Since so many of the problems that animated the rise
of the Black Panther Party unfortunately still exist, the core demands of Black
Lives Matter remain all too familiar. But, in addition to the remaining core
problems of racism, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and police
violence the more recent statement wisely expands its vision and agenda. For
example, the introduction to the document declares that “We believe in
elevating the experiences and leadership of the most marginalized Black people,
including but not limited to those who are women, queer, trans, femmes, gender
nonconforming, Muslim, formerly and currently incarcerated, cash poor and
working class, differently-abled, undocumented, and immigrant. We are
intentional about amplifying the particular experience of state and gendered
violence that Black queer, trans, gender nonconforming women and intersex
people face.”
The statement acknowledges its domestic focus but
declares that “Patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and white
supremacy know no borders. We stand in solidarity with our international family
against the ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism, human-made
climate change, war, and exploitation.”
Perhaps the greatest contribution that the BLM
platform makes is in its detailed 40 demands for change, each of which comes
with an explanation and policy proposals. Whereas the BPP platform concentrates
on a critique and demands for revolutionary changes, the BLM platform adds
doable intermediate changes in public policy. “We recognize that not all of our
collective needs and visions can be translated into policy, but we understand
that policy change is one of many tactics necessary to move us toward the world
we envision….We are dreamers and doers.”
And the BLM movement recognizes that it is linked to
the long history of struggle for liberation. “This agenda continues the legacy
of our ancestors who pushed for reparations, Black self-determination, and community
control, and also propels new iterations of movements such as efforts for
reproductive justice, holistic healing and reconciliation…” (A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for
Black Power, Freedom and Justice, policy.m4bl.org).
