Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Harry
Targ
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
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).
