Using vs. rejecting racial identity

A tension kept appearing throughout the readings and film: that between resisting and utilizing one's identity for political purposes. This tension is perhaps best exemplified in Richard Lentz quote about Time magazines attitude toward the BPP: "America was to be set right, not torn asunder" (78). This demonstrates the conflict between readjusting the current ways of thinking about race and overthrowing them. Would setting America "right" use definitions of right and wrong that exist within a racist ideology?

The Black Panther Party embraced whites' stereotypes about black men in order to psychologically intimidate them. I found Rhodes' criticism of the way the BPP was portrayed as threatening curious, considering that this threat was exactly their goal. During the Black Panthers' protest in the Capitol Building, Newton bemoaned that "the papers are going to call us thugs and hoodlums" (Newton qtd in Rhodes 70). Yet he and the other leaders knowingly used the image of the incorrigibly violent and lustful black male, reinforcing the very beliefs about race and gender (masculinity and phallic imagery of guns were also a large part of their campaign and its exclusionary aspects) that were keeping them down. I found this contradictory, but then I thought about how, to a certain extent, everybody plays a role that preceded and was assigned to them. For example, in Keeling's reading of Fanon, Fanon wants to reject the black pride movement that he finds to be essentializing blackness, but he also wants to create a black subjectivity. Couldn't this also become a universalizing category? Keeling says that "neither 'the Black' nor 'the White' can be or exist unproblematically" (28) — so does this bring us back to Gilroy? Or does being problematic also open up possibilities for exposure as such, or for strategy, or for boundary-pushing? If racial identity is inextricably linked to an oppressive hierarchy, is there any use in trying to escape it, or is it better to make do with this identity the way the BPP and cultural nationalists did? Where does one draw the line between owning one's racial identity and acknowledging it as part of a racist system? Is it possible to use one's own race without being used by it?