“Fifty years later, America still can’t understand the Black Panthers”
“There’s a strong tendency in American politics to want people and organizations to be judged good or bad, to feed their best and worst deeds through some sort of formula that will spit out a clear-cut verdict. “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” asks audiences to do something entirely different, and to consider that the party could have been many things to many people simultaneously: the source of vital “survival programs”; a militant organization intent on waging war with the cops; and the object of extraordinary government persecution…
The Black Panthers represent a missed opportunity, a moment when people in positions of power looked at a response to injustice and saw only the extremity of the response, rather than the desperation that produced it. “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” is an acknowledgment that even as we try to pin down the party’s legacy, we may still be missing the point.”
It's also interesting because the black panthers fall into this need of mainstream American for symmetry, where if white people are going to admit that the KKK was a terror organization then they need to be able to point to a black group that was also a terror organization, and they want to put the Black Panthers there. It’s the same thing with, like, saying that it’s the same thing to dress up as a Native American and dressing up in lederhosen to look German; saying that if white people can’t say black people are bad at math, then black people shouldn’t be able to say that white people are bad at dancing. These are all harmful things, yes, but that doesn’t mean they are all symmetrical or that they all some from the same place or same history or have the same impact on the world.
Related: “The New Black Panther Party, explained”
