The history of the Black Panther Party is filled with images of "hyper-masculinity. Historians, who conclude the Party was hyper-masculine, assume that it was misogynistic because of the guns and shit. Bobby Seale remembered a 1967 People’s Rally held by the Black Panther Party. The members barricaded a city block, so the only way to get on the street was through a barricade and armed Panthers. They often held block parties for fundraising and to inform the public of issues. The Panthers felt that the people needed to know and wanted to demonstrate Power while “moa-moaing” with the crowds. Seale recalls a specific rally where the theme was Power and the Party favors were guns. Everyone who came brought guns. “One sister came and jumped out of her car with an M-1. We saw the Black community getting uptight and ready.”[1]
*The #BlackPower and Party movements represented hyper-masculinity and the essence of The Blackdom Thesis. However, women were a large part of the revolution, accepted into this hyper-masculine world that was supposedly fighting emasculation by the “Pigs” who were agents of racism, government and “capitalist Pigs...” yatta yatta yatta.
The women’s revolution taking place simultaneously with the #BlackPower revolution offers a context for a closer examination of the hyper-masculinity theory. Grace Halsell, in 1969, was a white journalist who made the transition into what she called “Black Country” and “Dante’s inferno.” She went through the same process as John Howard Griffin who chronicled his dream of becoming black in Black Like Me.
*This White man took pills to add melatonin, burned himself under heat lamps and cut his hair to pass as a black person in the heart of Black Country. He wanted to “understand” the plight of Blacks as if being black was about skin color. But, I digress.
*Halsell took a drug to chemically darken her skin ass well. She describes this transformation as her entrance into the world of “Claude Brown, James Baldwin and Billie Holiday.” It is easy to see her exoticism oozing off the page of this book. Halsell was afraid of being in an area with a large concentration of black people, specifically, Harlem, because she had heard blacks in Harlem were mostly delinquents and, to a great extent, unsophisticated. The ones she feared the most were the members of the Black Panther Party. She understood them to be at war with the police and all white people. Halsell feared blacks, yet her fascination with them was so profound that she not only wanted to experience “Black Country”, she wanted to become black and live in “Black Country.”
*She writes, “The Black Panther Party and the Rams and those who are armed and ready to burn it all down, they want to kill a white for every black that’s ever been killed.”[2] She had heard that the Black Panther Party and other organizations for black liberation were as bad as the KKK and wondered what they would do if they had found out that she was white-passing as black.
*While Halsell was a “black” woman, she faced her fears when she was confronted with the Black Panther Party. A member of the Party saw her and invited her to accompany him for a night on the town. After going to a museum and a concert at the Apollo Theater, she was face to face with a delinquent at her door, waiting to smash.
*She writes, “After the show, we go to Small’s Paradise for a drink, and John asks if he can come by my apartment. I registered surprise because he’s making it apparent he thinks we should now go to bed.”[3] He tried to get close to her and she persisted in telling him that she was “old enough to be his mother.” John did not care; he was attracted and wanted her. “‘You,’ I say, perhaps meaning myself more than John, ‘can’t go around loving everyone.’”[4] Suddenly, she remembers that he was a Black Panther: “isn’t he supposed to hate everyone,” she asked herself. They get to her apartment building and she says, “I got by with a goodnight kiss and go to my room still amazed about love and hate what it can mean in everyday relationships.”[5] John shocked her because she had created in her mind a picture of Black Panthers as borderline psychotics.
~Within the context of this story, see the reality of consumer fear and fascination. The theoretical model of consumerism is easy to access for us to dig deeper into #WhiteSupremacy and "race." The U.S. notions of value; all things are because of capitalism’s market place, kinda. The consumer is value-conscious and the price is in direct relation of value, yatta, yatta, yatta...
*Value in consumerism is the power of alchemy: The details of consumerism as a theory are murky at best, but its like porn, I know it when I see it.
[ff}Halsell writes, “At the door, I had said to John, ‘You don’t seem to be afraid of anything.’ He replies, ‘I have not been afraid since I was five.’ She says, ‘I have. I have always been afraid, but I go around acting as if I’m not.’ He says, ‘It’s the same, isn’t it’?”[6]
The first scenario where the woman jumped out of her car with an M1, Halsell’s trek through Black Country, and John’s no fear attitude, represented two major elements in society at the time. In the same way, one can identify the Love and Theft of the essence of African descendants to dehumanize as a consumer good in the capitalist model of Halsell; meanwhile, it is also true that the young lady with the M1 rifle had similar access to what the Party defined, at the time, as Blackness and #BlackPower. Dripping from the blood-stained American flag and woven into the bars and stars of the social fabric is love. Racism is all of us dealing with the aftermath of the heist.
Halsell might argue she loved Black people.
The revolutionaries internalized Black Panther imagery as consumers do and Black Women embraced it as something available to all people, hence #AllPowerToAllPeople. The Black Panther Party provided a "masculine" consumer good perfectly suited for Black Women to perform the greatest Power in American... The Power of Alchemy.
*While in “Hell,” Halsell noticed that the black women were holding up the “white” standard, and she became “infuriated like the militants that were shouting ‘hell, no.”[7] The white standard that she was referring to was the mass consumption of hair straighteners and the social strata based on skin color that was a microcosm of racist America. Whiteness was a commodity that turned the Jewish community white in the post-WWII period. In fact, White Nationalists today, "Jews will not replace us."
Unequivocally, blackness was also a commodity as seen in the explosion of minstrelsy at the turn of the twentieth century. Also, in the commodification by Black people during the same period. In many ways, the turn of the twentieth century America was a better time for Black Folk then it is in the 2010s. Blackdom, for example, was an all-Black Afro-Fontierist town that struck-oil in 1920 under the powers of the Blackdom Oil Company. just a train ride north was Tulsa, White people dropped a bomb and annihilated generational wealth and the Black Liberation Spirit that came with it. #Blackdomites knew better and were receiving royalties from oil in the Korean War Era. Men and Women, Blackdomites were equal and the authority of law was guaranteed by the gold standard and the land they possessed.
Historians focus on hyper-masculinity when analyzing the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Movement. This is seen in the work of William Riches, Murray Friedman, Robert Carr, John McCartney, and many others.[8] There are just as many historians who present evidence for the wide range of contradictory policies of the Black Panther Party that subjugated women.
Black Panther female members wrote much of this evidence. Most notably, Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, and Afeni Shakur all present a picture of the Black Panther Party that shows a disconnect between the ideals of the Party, which centered on destroying oppression, and its actions, which were oppressive to women in the Party.[9] While the temptation has been to oblige the notions that the Black Panther Party was a contradiction of itself, there has not been a discussion as to where women fit into the hyper-masculine equation without assuming that they were “being men.”
Understand that Black Women at the turn of the twentieth century were gangsters. In 1917, #MittieMoore of Blackdom was on trial for the attempted murder of her fiance. #Mittie got off. According to witnesses, Mittie's fiance came into her speakeasy talking shit when she drew her revolver pulling the trigger and him walking out quickly with two holes in his coat. MittieWazaShooter among other things. Could it be that the women lead the way inspiring men to stand-up?
In 1974, Elaine Brown became the chairman of the Black Panther Party after Huey Newton exiled himself and asked her to save the Party. Before becoming the leader of the Party, she was subjected to brutality by Newton.
Brown writes, “I contemplated how only a week before, I had been planning to leave the party forever. It was just after Huey had done to me what was commonplace inside our dangerous ranks. He struck me. It was a slap in my face after I had made an innocuous remark. Huey had not so much as raised his voice in anger to me prior to that, not even in that last month when the snares of his madness had left so many others maimed.”[10]
She then describes the day when Newton slapped her. A thief had stolen money from the Party. They caught him and punished him. “I ignored the bloodied face of the thief, as I had learned to do. I had become hardened to such things like a Green Beret who learns to think nothing of taking a life….” Her experience in the Party was filled with violence, often thought to be hyper-masculine. She had been desensitized by the amount of violence within the ranks of the revolutionaries.
*1917-1971 was a vicious time for Black women and women without the cover of "a man in the house." Certain exploitation was to befall a girl or woman without a village. So, violence wasn't a big deal {masculine or otherwise] except when one could harness the violence for good.
Shortly after Brown walked into the Black Panther penthouse while Newton and other Party members were disciplining the thief, he stopped the “madness” to speak with her. “Before I could tell Huey why I had come, he spoke to me in a sort of stage whisper.”[11] She assumed and had evidence that at the time Newton, was high on cocaine, restless, and had been up for at least forty hours. What he told her was, “it’s important that you go back to your music. I want you to study music seriously. The party will pay for everything.” What she saw was a man that was sweating with glazed eyes that “darted back and forth almost uncontrollably.”[12] She thanked him and anxiously wanted to get out of there. She writes, “He raised his hand suddenly and smacked me across the face. Then, clenching my jaw, he pulled me near him with his other, our noses almost touching. In a careful staccato, he said, “Don’t ever say that to me. When you thank me, it means you are separate from me, not with me.”[13]
One can only speculate what Newton meant here. He could have believed in the idea that the Black Panther Party was one entity of which all members were one, and her comment violated that bond. Newton could have been speaking in the language of a paranoid inebriated stupor, brought on by abuse of narcotics as many members report he tended to do. In any case, Brown’s situation was evidence for the atmosphere within the Party; full of violence, debauchery, and corruption: a detail that historians use to make the case for its supposed contradictions and lack of discipline and moral character.
Nevertheless, it is also evidence of the great lengths that the Party took to create an organization of revolutionaries. The current analysis concludes that hyper-masculinity is the powder keg for which any instance of outbursts can be explained. Christopher Booker writes, “For the contemporary black male, the Panther look was the symbol of the new aggressive masculinity, which would no longer plead and beg for equality but, rather, engage in a protracted outward thrust to seize it.”[14] Booker argues that males were attracted to the image of Power. However, Brown would eventually become the leader of these masculinity-starved men.
A few days after the slap in the face, Newton beat up another member and went to jail as a result. Brown raised $80,000 bail for Newton and went to the bondsman to sign some papers when afterward, Newton hugged her and whispered “goodbye.” Newton then went into hiding. In hiding, he called Brown and commanded: “Save the Party.”[15] She said yes after Newton mustered up troops for her backup and protection.
Elaine Brown was born on March 2, 1943, in Philadelphia{Home of the #BlackIlluminati.
David Roediger, Eric Lott, and Brian Roberts present evidence for the idea that white people consumed other cultures as a way of reinventing themselves in a form of American Alchemy from European to White.[17] In each argument, the case was made in a one-way exchange where white people consumed blackness or white people consumed that which they labeled as perverse, yet were attracted to it. Brown’s story reveals something more potent than the hyper-masculinity echoed in the words of Grace Halsell's nightmare: {rw]Halsell writes, “At the door, I had said to John, ‘You don’t seem to be afraid of anything.’ He replies, ‘I have not been afraid since I was five.’ She says, ‘I have. I have always been afraid, but I go around acting as if I’m not.’ He says, ‘It’s the same, isn’t it’?”[6]
Brown loved her first sexual partner; however, she expressed more love for his ability to be white than anything else. She connected his whiteness with his family’s wealth and upper-middle-class consumption habits. When Brown grew up, she fell in love with a wealthy white (married with children) man who taught her to appreciate her blackness. He introduced her to famous people and she experienced Las Vegas in a way that only the wealthy could, having drinks at Frank Sinatra’s home. He also showed her the importance of the nonviolent civil rights struggle. He was also a Marxist. Brown describes an incident in which she was walking to the bathroom, after making love to her “father” Jay when he commented on her butt being high. She took offense to it because she liked “being white.” For Brown, after learning to play the piano and dance ballet, she had become “white.”
Just as Halsell and Griffin felt authentically black, she felt authentically white. Jay’s comment on her backside offended her because she felt that she was not the stereotypical colored girl and certainly not black. His response was,
!Special Excerpt From Brown: don’t understand darling, the African woman’s genitals are tucked neatly, sweetly, underneath, and her buttocks are, therefore, high. Not like the European woman’s genitals, raised and thrust forward, ass low and flat as a result. Nature accommodated your ancestors and you, keeping your delicate parts away from harm, away from the high grasses through which you had to run.[18]
Jay responded to her annoyance by explaining to Brown that she should not deny her beauty.... for it was one of the only things that were saved from the bastardization of slavery. His racist beliefs were hidden from Brown by the fact that he supported civil rights and marched on Washington with Martin Luther King. Most of all, he loved her. He consumed blackness to the point of reaching not racist status{ long story}. Brian Roberts associates the middle-class construction with their fascination with the “perverse” and exotic. While Halsell and Griffin were able to be “black,” Brown was able to be “white” as long as whites did not restrict her to only being black.
Brown's story is analogous to the limitations of consumer culture that excluded black people’s ability to fully take advantage of the system [see Blackdom]. All black people who attempted to be “white,” or exist outside of the boundaries set for black people were limited and repressed by whites. They enjoyed for a moment what they thought it was like to be white when they consumed what they thought white people consumed. While Halsell and Griffin consumed blackness through changing their skin color, black people were doing the same thing. During the black revolution, African Americans threw away their “skin bleach and hair straighteners, emphasizing their own characteristics and joyously affirming their skin color and life-styles, music and food, dialect and culture.”[19]
The new dynamic in American culture was a form of identity politics that cut white people off from their “black heritage.” As explained earlier, one element of becoming white is consuming blackness. And, just as when Jay told Brown that she was black, identity politics conveyed to white people that they were white. Brown was consuming Jay’s whiteness. Her idea of whiteness was his intellectualism, his wealth, his social standing, and his blue eyes and blond hair. She writes that the bathroom incident helped her appreciate herself as a black woman as the white man appreciated her blackness.
All of the above, and yet #RaceDoesntExist
by Dr. Timothy E. Nelson ©
NOTES
[1] Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. (New York: Random House, 1968), 140.
[2] Grace Halsell, Soul Sister. (New York: World Publishing Company, 1969), 23.
[3] Halsell, Soul Sister, 131.
[4] Halsell, Soul Sister, 131.
[5] Halsell, Soul Sister, 131.
[6] Halsell, Soul Sister, 131.
[7] Halsell, Soul Sister, 75.
[8] William T. Martin Riches, The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resistance. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997); Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong?: The Creation and the Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance. (New York: Free Press, 1995); Robert Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideology: An Essay in African American Political Thought. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
[9] Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); Kathleen Cleaver, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001); Afeni Shakur, Afeni Shakur: Evolution to Revolution. (New York: Atria Books, 2004).
[10] Brown, A Taste of Power, 9.
[11] Brown, A Taste of Power, 9.
[12] Brown, A Taste of Power, 9.
[13] Brown, A Taste of Power, 9.
[14] Christopher Booker, “I Will Wear No Chains!: A Social History of African American Males. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2000), 194.
[15] Brown, A Taste of Power, 11.
[16] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
[17] Eric Lott, Love, and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. (New York: Oxford Press, 1993); David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class Revised Edition. (New York: Verso, 1991); Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: the California Gold Rush and Middle- Class Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000)
[18] Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 93.
[19] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Fire. (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1978), 202.
[20] Brown, A Taste of Power, 105.
[21] Brown, A Taste of Power, 224.
[22] Philip S. Foner ed., The Black Panthers Speak. (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 31.
[23] Brown, A Taste of Power, 191-192.
[24] Carr, Black Nationalism in the World, 195.
[25] Manning Marble, From the Grassroots: Essay Toward Afro-American Liberation. (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 102.
[26] Hutchinson, Earl Ofari, The Assassination of the Black Male Image. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) pg 70
[27] Kum-Kum Bhavnani ed., Feminism and ‘Race’. (New York: Oxford University, 2001)
[28] Charles E. Jones ed., The Black Panther Party: Reconsidered. (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998).
[29] Kum-Kum Bhavnani ed., Feminism and ‘Race’. (New York: Oxford University, 2001), 63.
[30] Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton. (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 93.
[31] Brown, A Taste of Power, 189.
[32] Brown, A Taste of Power, 189.
[33] Brown, A Taste of Power, 189.
[34] Brown, A Taste of Power, 192.
[35] Brown, A Taste of Power, 43.
[36] Brown, A Taste of Power, 43.
[37] Thomas Frank and Matt Wieland, Commodify Your Dissent. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 32.
[38] Black Revolutionary is an all-encompassing term that refers to the people of various Black movements in the late 1960s on.
[39] “Angela Davis Is Sought in Shooting That Killed Judge on Coast,” New York Times, 16 August 1970.
[40] Angela Davis, An Autobiography. (New York: Random House, 1974), 6.
[41] Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green eds., Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure. (New York: New York Press, 1998), 23.
[42] Lani Guinier, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
[43] Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland eds., Commodify Your Dissent. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 34.
Original article appeared on LinkedIn Aug 16th, 2019
