{"id":112,"date":"2013-10-15T20:15:23","date_gmt":"2013-10-16T00:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/?p=112"},"modified":"2025-05-12T16:25:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T20:25:12","slug":"black-against-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/2013\/10\/15\/black-against-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"An Anti-Empire State of Mind: Black Against Empire Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party<\/i>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.<\/p>\n

The burgeoning field of Black Power studies has produced a wealth of innovative and sophisticated treatments of the activists, organizations, and ideas that emerged in the late-1960s offering new and radical visions of racial equality and social justice in the United States.\u00a0 Much research about Black Power has sought to understand the influence of its driving personalities, to examine specific tactics or ideals of leading organizations, or to elucidate national shifts through studies of social and racial developments in specific locales.\u00a0 The existing scholarship is rich and multi-faceted, but has only recently begun to unravel and make sense of some of the central paradoxes and contradictions that allowed the militancy and self-determination articulated by proponents of Black Power to capture the imagination of African Americans and other marginalized groups both domestically and internationally\u2014and in doing so, to win the fear and respect of agents of white power all the way up to the FBI.\u00a0 Among Black Power groups, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, was the most violently suppressed, philosophically sophisticated, and glamorized and maligned by mainstream media.\u00a0 Much written about the Party has been formulated in response to preconceptions and contemporary mythologies about the Panthers either as a violent gang of thugs or as laudable folk heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the people.\u00a0 These tendencies in scholarship and memory have for decades complicated the process of devising a cohesive, national history of the Black Panther Party that effectively explains the periodization of its political and organizational development\u2014an explanation necessary to comprehend the revolutionary potential and practical shortcomings of the Party as a legitimate and historically-contingent force for social change.<\/p>\n

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party<\/i> (2013), co-authored by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., takes up this task, offering a riveting and thoughtful narrative of the Party\u2019s formation and ideational evolution. Characterizing their own methodological approach as one of \u201cstrategic genealogy,\u201d the authors contend that \u201cwhat is unique and historically important about the Black Panther Party is specifically its politics\u201d (9).\u00a0 They therefore consider seriously the Black Panther Party as a political organization concerned with understanding, articulating, and remedying the economic, structural, and institutional forces that enriched and empowered the few at the expense of the masses.\u00a0 Bloom and Martin skillfully expound the philosophical and ideological continuities and divergences of the Party\u2019s shifting emphases, particularly from its founding tactics of armed self-defense and \u201cpolicing the police\u201d to its establishment of such lauded community programs as free breakfasts for school children, clothing and shoe giveaways, and screenings for sickle-cell-anemia.<\/p>\n

This progression from guns to butter was not reformist or counterrevolutionary but instead a flexible and logical response to official efforts to thwart the Party\u2019s growth and influence.\u00a0 In the authors\u2019 estimation, the unifying thread and the centerpiece of Panther political philosophy was a \u201cnondogmatic, Marx-inflected anti-imperialis[t]\u201d worldview\u2014an incisive, timely critique of class and power in the United States.\u00a0 Bloom and Martin posit that Panther politics was undergirded by a belief that black Americans and other disenfranchised and oppressed groups were, in effect, internal colonies of the United States and its \u201coccupying army,\u201d embodied most egregiously by abusive agents of local law enforcement.\u00a0 The interracial, cross-cultural, and politically innovative alliances the Party forged were both possible and momentarily effective because the Panthers, and particularly Party co-founder and political philosopher Huey Newton, interpreted the world at the end of the 1960s in a way that made sense to a variety of suffering peoples who were, if not ripe for radicalization, sympathetic to the demands and tactics of militants in America\u2019s streets.\u00a0 According to Bloom and Martin, \u201cThe Panthers drew a line dividing the world in two.\u00a0 They argued that the oppression of draft resisters by the National Guard was the same as oppression of blacks by the police and the same as the oppression of the Vietnamese by the marines\u201d (393).\u00a0 Examining the psychological effects of this \u201cghettoization\u201d on individual and communal development, Black Against Empire<\/i> deftly situates the daily (lowercase \u201cp\u201d) politics of survival in poor urban black communities within the context of the international (capital \u201cP\u201d) political struggles of subjugated nations and peoples against forces of global imperialism.\u00a0 By this account, Panther politics acknowledged the international dimensions of systems defining the rights of people not only by their relation to state power but by the political dynamics governing nations\u2019 relationships to each other as well.<\/p>\n

In contrast to scholarship suggesting that the Black Power era, and the Black Panther Party in particular, was an aberration or departure from civil rights struggles of the 1950s and early 1960s\u2014a sudden shift from liberal tactics to gain political concessions and citizenship rights to apolitical violence borne of frustration and impatience\u2014Black Against Empire<\/i> situates the Panthers\u2019 anti-colonialist sentiments and anti-imperialist rhetoric within the long history of African American groups and movements \u201clike the Nation of Islam, Garveyism, and varieties of worker- and union-based activism dating back to the nineteenth century\u201d (196).\u00a0 Among Black Power groups, the Black Panther Party rose to national prominence \u201cbecause it was creative politically[,]\u2026seiz[ing] the political imagination of a large constituency of young black people[,]\u2026.articulat[ing] this revolutionary movement\u2026to a broader oppositional movement, [and] drawing allied support from more moderate blacks and opponents of the Vietnam War of every race\u201d (400).\u00a0 As this work proves, the Panthers were not insular and impulsive but instead largely collaborative and deliberate\u2014qualities that inspired followers and created coalitions.\u00a0 When the conditions maintaining this alliance of radicals dissipated with civil rights advances and the beginning of the end of the war, \u201cthe practices that had won the Panthers so much influence became futile\u201d (400).\u00a0 While some scholars have previously argued that Panther programs and principles were not as counterintuitive or contradictory as they first appear, none have done so more compellingly or definitively than Bloom and Martin.\u00a0 Black Against Empire<\/i> is essential reading for those looking to understand the rise and fall of movements for social change, for as Bloom and Martin solemnly conclude, \u201c[n]o revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries\u201d succeeds in \u201ccreating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease.\u201d\u00a0 As social inequality and government inaction reach unprecedented extremes, the need to build coalitions is no less vital in the age of Obama than it was during the heyday of the Black Panthers.<\/p>\n

-Mary Potorti<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. The burgeoning field of Black Power studies has produced a wealth of innovative and sophisticated treatments of the activists, organizations, and ideas that emerged in the late-1960s offering new and radical … Continue reading An Anti-Empire State of Mind: Black Against Empire Book Review<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":328,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[46040,46039,46036,46041],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/328"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":251,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions\/251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}