The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH – VOL.2, ISSUE #5, DEC/2010-FEB/2011
Oakland is a cracker town, a 44 percent black urban plantation, a center of bigotry, a segregated dead end for people of color, and the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. To understand Oakland is perhaps to comprehend why an escalation of the tactics of black revolution, in the form of a political orientation dedicated to the overthrow of American institutions, began in these ghetto streets. But these insights are available only to those who are willing to empathize (if not identify) with the human condition that led Huey P. Newton to insist that black political power must proceed from the barrel of a gun.
The black condition in Oakland is not really separate from that of the whites. In reality, the fact of blackness only serves to concentrate disproportionately within a physical minority the effects of a generalized disregard for human worth. Panthers refer to themselves as the vanguard, an assertion that compels them to adopt the role of being that minority among blacks which demonstrates some of the political realities of black existence. They maintain that the vanguard position automatically results in their attracting a concentration of the repressive reflexes of those who maintain law and order through racism.
Similarly, blacks can be considered that group which can best display to whites the kinds of injustices endemic to the society as a whole. For racism does not create new brands of injustice; it only blunts the sensitivities of the majority group to the inequities it tolerates as normal. One aspect of Panther unhappiness with whites, therefore, issues from the fact that whites are not moving to eliminate the injustices they visit upon each other. Under these conditions, they are skeptical about the ability of whites to discover the necessity of treating blacks with the humanity and justice they deny themselves.
*excerpted from Reginald Major, A Panther is a Black Cat, (Black Classic Press, 1971, 2006).
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