On The Question Of Sexism Within The Black Panther Party
By Safiya Bukhari-Alston
The May 5, 1993 N.Y. Times Op-Ed page exchange between former
Black Panther Party member Elaine Brown and "Color Purple" author
Alice Walker about former Black Panther Party member David
Hilliard's book "This Side Of Glory", where Alice Walker criticized
the Black Panther Party's male leadership as sexist, make glaringly
obvious that it's necessary to put the issue of sexism in the Black
Panther Party in its correct perspective. Alice Walker, in what is
hyped to be an attack on sexism within the Black Panther Party,
seems to spend more time attacking what she presumes to be the
sexuality of the male leadership, i.e. her allusions to
homoeroticism. While Alice plays with the question of what she
presumes to be the sexuality of the male leadership, I will attempt
to address the issue of sexism. By anybody's definition, these are
not interchangeable words.
The error everyone seems to be making, supporters and
detractors of the Black Panther Party alike, is separating the
Party from its time and roots and looking at it in a vacuum. Quite
clearly, the Black Panther Party came out of the Black community
and its experiences. The membership of the Black Panther Party was
recruited from the ghettos of the inner cities. The Party itself
was founded in Oakland, California in the spring of 1966 by two
Black men who came straight out of the ghetto and met on the campus
of Merritt College. It was founded as a response to the rampant
police brutality against the Black community committed by the
notorious Oakland Police Department.
Bobby Seale and Huey Newton envisioned the Black Panther Party
(for Self Defense) as just that, a community-based organization
which sought to defend the community against police brutality and
set an example of revolutionary activism. In defining the work of
the Party they looked to other struggles around the world and to
Mao Tse Tung's Red Book "Quotations of Chairman Mao" for direction.
The Eight Points of Attention and the Three Main Rules of
Discipline were lifted directly from this book. One of the Eight
Points was Do Not Take Liberties With Women. This was a monumental
step forward in addressing the issue of the treatment of women. The
simple fact that the issue was placed in/on the books was a step
forward. Now we had to make it a part of our everyday lives, the
everyday lives of the lumpen who were the majority element of the
Black Panther Party.
On October 28, 1967, only one year after the founding of the
Black Panther Party, Huey Newton was incarcerated following an
incident where a police officer had been killed and Huey was
wounded. This, along with the march on the California State Capitol
at Sacremento with guns, catapulted the Black Panther Party into
national prominence.
The ideology of the Black Panther Party developed out of the
struggle of people of African descent in the United States for
freedom, a struggle which began on the slave ships and continues
today. This struggle is seen through the prism of Marxism-Leninism
and scientific socialism. It was an attempt to overcome the
romanticism and idealism which was characteristic of Black
organizations at the time and replace it with a pragmatic analysis
that allowed for "social practice" being "the criteria for truth".
Nonetheless, it had its own unique analysis of which class was the
vanguard of the struggle for Black liberation.
The Party believed that the only group that was capable of
moving the struggle forward was the lumpen proletariat (lumpens) -
i.e. the brother and sister "off the block" (the last hired and the
first fired), the hustler, the welfare mother, etc. The Party felt
that they were at the bottom rung of the totem pole and had nothing
to lose. It was this element that the Black Panther Party recruited
from the ghetto and tried to politicize.
How does this relate to the issue of sexism within the Black
Panther Party and the movement in general? In order to understand
the issue of sexism in the Party it is necessary to review the
historical experience of Black people in this country as well as
the climate in which the Black Panther Party came into being. We
took those facts and set them within the historical framework of
the Black experience.
What, then, was/is the Black experience in this country?
We were brought over in the same condition, packed like
sardines in the bowels of slave ships. We were herded like cattle
to the slave auctions and sold to the highest bidder to be used as
workhorses, studs, breeders, and household help. We were defined by
our capabilities as breeders, studs, or slave labourers. The women
were further categorized by how pleasing they were to the eyes of
the slavemasters. The destruction of our culture, which started
with the stealing of our language, religion, and children, was
completed when we began to measure our own worth by how many women
the Black man could "pleasure" at a time and how many children we
could have.
Since they had been stripped of their manhood in every way but
the ability to "pleasure" women and make babies, the sexual act
soon became the measure by which the Black man measured his
manhood. The Black women worked right alongside the Black man in
the field and she worked in the Master's house. The Black man could
not defend or protect his family, while in most cases the Black
woman was the one who defended or protected the family from the
slavemaster's wrath by any means necessary.
Having been deprived of our Africanism, we began to take on
the persona of our slavemasters and fill the void of our lost
culture with the slave culture that was foisted upon us. It is this
that is the root of the sexism that is plaguing our communities
today. Unlike the sexism that is characteristic of the white
community though, the sexism of the Black community has its basis
in racism and self-hate. The division in the Black community
between the Black male and the Black female did not just come about
on its own. It was carefully thought out and cultivated. After the
end of chattel slavery, Black men, for the most part, couldn't get
jobs. The Black woman had to be the breadwinner as well as the
homemaker. This, in conjunction with the already festering sore of
having to stand by and watch while the woman was raped and made to
bear the master's children and then wet nurse the children of the
white women, was too much for the Black man to handle
psychologically and resulted in the Black man casting the blame for
his situation at the feet of the Black woman. As time went on this
love/hate/anger triangle began to manifest itself in the sexism
that is present today in the Black community.