{"id":7471,"date":"2022-08-30T22:36:30","date_gmt":"2022-08-31T02:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=7471"},"modified":"2022-09-12T02:52:46","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T06:52:46","slug":"assata-taught-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/08\/assata-taught-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Assata Taught Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naomi Murakawa:<\/span><\/strong> You start Assata Taught Me<\/a><\/em> with the Black Panther Party in Oakland in 1966. The Panthers were seen as a threat not just because of their Blackness, but because they were engaged in Black-led class struggle that was deeply internationalist and confrontational with the state. You offer us a fuller picture of how we should understand the Panthers and how we should understand Assata Shakur. Can you tell us why you return to the Panthers of 1966 to launch a book that is mostly about explaining the present?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Donna Murch:<\/span><\/strong> While we still have the iconography of the Panther Party, and its traditions of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, the party is best known for its breakfast programs and its survival programs. But these were not forms of mutual aid in the way that\u2019s conceived of today. They were explicitly political. The idea was, we need survival programs, given the stingy and punitive nature of the welfare state, with its \u201cno man in the house\u201d rule. For families to receive cash assistance, you had to have a social worker come in to make sure there was no man living there.<\/p>\n

The 1960s is a period when a lot of the economic and material struggle of the Black radical movement and the Civil Rights movement was to force concessions from the state. We know in the 1930s, in many ways, Black people, through the elimination of the job categories of domestic worker and agricultural worker, were not included within the Social Security Act. In the 1960s, a lot of what\u2019s being litigated is trying to get access, saying, \u201cWe deserve access to the state.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A
The Black Panthers in Washington, DC, announce the opening of a second location for free breakfasts in 1970. Image by Washington Area Spark<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The party goes through different periods in its history. The earliest period is armed self-defense and the use of police patrols\u2014policing the state\u2014inspired by the organizing that took place in Watts a year and a half before. After this period, the Panthers move into what they call \u201csurvival pending revolution.\u201d And they have essentially these food give-away and other service programs as a way to shame the state and to make claims on it. I think it\u2019s that tradition, which is both internationalist and really identifying with revolutionary movements and state socialism, that was core to the Panthers\u2019 vision.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re left often with a kind of cartoon vision. \u201cThe Panthers wore leather jackets and powder-blue shirts and sunglasses.\u201d But at the core, the party was a group of young people that used many different strategies, which evolved and changed throughout its history.<\/p>\n

But thinking about a party that is internationalist and fighting against anti-communism, that was explicitly anti-capitalist and had a confrontational relationship with the state, while simultaneously feeling that they needed to extract resources from the state\u2014to me, that\u2019s one of the most important lessons of the Black Panther Party.<\/p>\n

NM:<\/span> I think one of my frustrations, as we\u2019ve seen a so-called mainstreaming of abolition, is that there\u2019s a tendency to think that radical politics means pointing to various things and saying, \u201cAbolish it!\u201d. I feel there\u2019s some fundamental confusion that equates anti-capitalism with anti-statism, and says that anti-racism is anti-statism. But what I\u2019m hearing from you and your book is that there has to be much more meaningful engagement and a willingness to make demands on the state.<\/strong><\/p>\n

DM:<\/span><\/strong> Yes, that\u2019s absolutely right. And that\u2019s something I\u2019ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in Philadelphia now. I\u2019ve lived in different cities across the United States and seen different tendencies on the Left. And I think that we need to return to the archives of radical struggle, especially in this post\u2013Cold War period. Willingness to make demands on the state is one of the most important fault lines, and it\u2019s a fault line that those of us who are older and lived through the Cold War understand.<\/p>\n

This generational fault line really matters. I think without a connection to these earlier periods of struggle, many people are coming of age in the United States at a time when simply being anti-state makes sense. We\u2019ve seen a gutting of so much of the welfare state, the enormous growth in the carceral apparatus, and people feel as if the state is only a source of violence. That\u2019s understandable.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s why I think the archives of past struggle matter, and that includes the Panther Party, it includes the League of Revolutionary Black Workers<\/a>, it includes many different tendencies that were able to confront state power and state violence, but also argue that the greatest source of violence is often capital itself and its relationship to the state, and understand that as central.<\/p>\n

NM:<\/span><\/span> The final chapter of your book is a retrospective on the Movement for Black Lives from the standpoint of 2021. It\u2019s now mid-2022, and my head is spinning around the speed of voter disenfranchisement, of the Critical Race Theory bans that are remaking public education, of the destruction of reproductive freedoms, of the attacks on trans children. How are you characterizing this present moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

DM:<\/span><\/strong> It\u2019s a really hard time. I mean, I\u2019m devastated by what\u2019s happening. I can\u2019t lie. I\u2019m afraid.<\/p>\n

The right has opportunities. American history has so many moments of terrible violence. We talk about this all the time, those of us who teach African American History. Sometimes it\u2019s just very hard. You have to teach the history of slavery, and then you teach the resistance to it. You teach the history of emancipation, and then you teach the enormous violence of Redemption and the violence that always follows Black accomplishment. And similar stories can be told about Indigenous populations and other people of color in the United States. But it\u2019s hard. We don\u2019t always want to teach the African American survey among the faculty. We like to trade off because we like to teach our own classes so that we can frame African American history in ways that aren\u2019t as devastating.<\/p>\n