The Question of the Color Line

While it is worthwhile to focus on the political, epistemological implications of the Black Panther's gun usage, I think it would be more productive to analyze the reception the party received from the media/pop culture/political arena because of their tactics and agenda. The Black Panthers' first introduction, facilitated and agitated by the media, was a quintessential moment that defined the party's national and public image as a group of menacing, radical, and hyperviolent Blacks with guns. The Black Panther's power inversion and the endless debates about the ethics of this inversion is something I would like to explore further:

"By framing the Panthers as extremists in the vein of the Ku Klux Klan, the news media demonstrated an inability ... to distinguish between the donning of a white hood and the wearing of a black beret as symbolic practices.... This framing revealed the raw fear the Panthers inspired; [many] editorials assumed the Black Panthers sought to terrorize whites in the same way the Klan terrorized blacks..." (Rhodes, p. 71).

I would like to go deeper into the issue of the ethics of liberation. Is it not possible at all that the party could come to be defined on their own terms? Or will they fall into the trap of being perpetually compared to the KKK? They wielded agentive guns with metaphorical ideological violence and attempted to subvert a strictly hierarchical system of white dominance, and this subversion whether it was intentional or not and whether it was achieved is debatable. Looking to the past and making connections to the present, I found that this comparison was quite ludicrous, spelling out how whiteness works in America. Whites weren’t being systematically killed, and when whites incited the systematical mass murder of Blacks, in the form of southern mobs who led thousands of lynchings, their actions were not criticized by the public.

This leads us to the need for an understanding of the hegemony of whites in America. So, why was it that the Black usurpation of this position of violence and ideological warfare was so stigmatized? In America, mainstream and public spectatorship has become extremely racialized. The extent of the racialization of power is exemplified by whites’ monopolization of the means of discourse and their occupying of the privileged position as an unmarked category. Puncturing this white hegemony, the Black Panthers were able to achieve this through their collective action. Through the agency of guns, appeal to the mass and geographical ubiquity, the Black Panthers were the nexus of the Black radical tradition of that time.