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Plundering the Panthers, Manipulating the Movement: Re-Branding the Black
Panther Party
Plundering the
Panthers, Manipulating the Movement: Re-Branding the Black Panther Party
By Bruce
A. Dixon
Created 12/02/2009
- 02:55
Every
movement has its symbols and icons. But when these are separated from
their context and content they are nothing but brands, to be employed for
whatever commercial or political purpose anyone has in mind, even purposes
opposite those of the movement which gave birth to them.
Plundering the Panthers, Manipulating the Movement: Re-Branding
the Black Panther Party
by BAR
managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Founded in
1966 and dissolved a little more than a decade later, the Black Panther Party
is history. A few thousand of its graying participants in what we always called
“the Party” are still very much alive. Most of us still look for and find ways
to contribute to the struggle for human liberation. But the sixties are a long
way off. 1969 is as far distant from us today as the world of the Great
Depression was from our youth. 1969 is a full quarter of the way back to the Emancipation
Proclamation.
While the
Black Panther Party is long dead, its symbols, slogans and icons, like those of
the broader Freedom Movement live on as ripe targets for commercial, historical
and political manipulation. The manipulators have grown incomparably more
sophisticated since the sixties. The practitioners of modern marketing are able
to separate the slogans, the symbols, the iconography of yesterday's movement
movement for change from their historic context and wave them in front of
audience to evoke the feeling, the smell, the memories of a previous
generation's struggle for freedom. Even the memories are usually imaginary
ones, since not much of the audience has any direct experience of the social
and political atmosphere out of which the symbols, the language and the icons
arose.
The
marketing people have a name for this. They call it branding. A brand is a
symbol used to evoke manufactured desires, real or imagined chills, thrills,
memories or convenient attitudes in an audience. In the black community,
branding electoral campaigns from dog catcher to mayor to congress with the
stamp of the Freedom Movement is old stuff that's been done for decades. The
2007-2008 Obama carried this about as far as anybody could, declaring that it
WAS “the movement” so often and insistently that many folks without experience
of such a thing --- along with a few who really should know better --- seemed
to believe. Advertising Age, the journal of the marketing industry knew the
truth, and awarded the Obama campaign its 2008 Brand of
the Year Award [1].
You can buy
Che Guevara's face on T-shirts, and Dr. King's family members have sued some
people for the unauthorized use of his words and images with one hand while
allowing giant corporations to use “I Have A Dream” in some of their
commercials.
The Black
Panther Party's symbols and language, its potent icons and images are not
immune from this kind of thing. While nobody is making big money off any of it,
a small group of political pretenders, paper panthers as we used to call them,
have seized the Black Panther Party's name and symbols, and grabbed a few
corrupted bits of its language and style to push a political agenda pretty much
the opposite of the long dead Black Panther Party. The largest group of these
folks call themselves the “New Black Panther Party”, and that's pretty much
where the similarity ends. To illustrate how far these pretenders have carried
the stolen iconography of the Black Panther Party from its actual context, I
have reproduced below the 1966 and 1971 versions of the BPP's Ten Point
Platform and Program along with what the so-called “New Black Panther Party”
calls its Ten Points.
Founded in
1966, the year after Malcolm X's death, the Black Panther Party viewed itself
as his ideological successor. Malcolm X had just emerged from the NOI and its
almost purely race-based view of the world into an anti-colonial, anti-imperial
world view, one that acknowledged the necessity of seeking white allies began
to think in terms of class and race rather than race alone. This was not the
position of the BPP so much as it was its trajectory. Just as Malcolm himself
had been an unfinished work in progress, evolving from petty criminal to the
NOI to something else afterward, the BPP seems to have viewed itself as obliged
to evolve. It too was a moving target, tending steadily leftward for most of
its existence integrating a Marxist and anti-imperialist analysis into its
critiques of American white supremacy.
The old BPP
appears, from the evidence of the 1966 and 1971 platforms, to have been moving
in the direction of socialism. The organization which calls itself the NBPP on
the other hand, appears to be aimed in a quite different direction, lifting
phrases, concepts and a purely race-based world view from Ron Karenga’s and his
US organization, which was widely believed implicated in a series of murders
and assaults on members of the Black Panther Party at the behest of federal and
local authorities in California and elsewhere. But the pretenders who parade
themselves in near-authentic Panther regalia are spouting verbatim the work of
people who murdered members of the Black Panther Party on behalf of the US
government.
Everything
comes from somewhere, and origins do often mean something. It means something
that the so-called New Black Panthers chose to call themselves that. It means
that the NBPP want to be taken seriously as the moral or spiritual or political
or ideological heirs of the people whose symbols they have appropriated.
They're not anything of the sort. They are a distorted and cartoonish reflection
of what the BPP was, racist, religious and nationalistic where the party was
anti-racist, internationalist and secular; addicted to inflammatory rhetoric
and posing in leather jackets, berets and with guns.
The old
Black Panther Party is long dead. The New Black Panthers and pretenders like
them don't seem to have an original bone in their bodies. Nobody looks to these
pretenders for original analyses of current happenings. They cannot and do not
fill rooms with ordinary people anyplace in the country. They were never alive.
They are undead, zombies living off the remnant symbols of a previous
generation. The real movement that is to come in this country, and in our
communities, will arise from some other quarter.
I know it's
coming. I just hope, like the rest of us graying ex-Panthers, to stick around
long enough to see, and maybe take some part in it..