The Parasitic Nature of the Black Panthers Self Representation

I found the notion of media framing as discussed in Rhodes “Media and Self-Representation” very interesting . That in order to understand the Black panthers as a cohesive sociopolitical group within the already established social order, their public image had to be forced into dominant categories.

Pre-established notions of blackness and revolutionary factions (communist fears) made the Black Panthers violent, irresponsible, irrational, anti-Americans. What’s interesting is the way the BP’s method of self representation was implicated in this characterization. The fact that they were armed was a powerful symbolic determinant: for the BPs it was meant to empower through the possibility of defense, for medias and certain white it meant the deep fear of race retribution. The Black Panthers need to re-appropriate white conceptions of black youth and political radicalism forced them to sacrifice media sympathy, and ultimately implicate themselves in their stereotyping.

This is demonstrated in Rhode’s discussion of the Black Panthers construction of black masculinity. The Black Panthers most attractive elements was creating an accessible prescriptive identity of black hyper-masculinity: uniform, gun, rhetoric, and place of leadership. This construction also meant the group promoted established prejudices of homophobia and sexism in order to situate their ‘self-made’ identity within the white patriarchy, as if reiterating dominant constructions would allow black masculinity to subsist beside white masculinity. This move speaks to the way in which the dominant ideology and oppression that structure us ultimately structure our resistance, which allows patterns of discrimination to repeat themselves and persist. Much of the BP’s self-representation engaged white racism not in a resistive way but in a parasitic way, feeding off and depending on white’s fears and constructed stereotypes for the groups coherent meaning, indicating that the neither the group nor their political aims would ever evolve past these.