First written on February 20, 2024. Copied to new website May 23, 2024.

In 1966, the Black Panther Party (BPP) was labeled a terrorist organization by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Three years later, the director of the FBI (Edgar Hoover) would go so far as to say that the BPP was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

How could an organization like the BPP, which created more than 60 “survival programs” across the US, fed 20,000 school children every day with free breakfast programs, provided resources like food and clothing to the elderly and poor, opened dozens of free health clinics, challenged brutal and racist policing, and advocated for social reform, be labeled a terrorist group?

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense began in Oakland, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. The organization was created in direct response to the brutal conditions they were living through, namely apartheid (e.g. Jim Crow from 1870s to 1960s & beyond) the daily threat of police brutality, and systemic antiblackness that African Americans had experienced in the United States for centuries. At one point, Newton and Seale polled community members to understand the community’s concerns. They then compiled the responses and created the Ten Point Platform and Program that served as the foundation of the Black Panther Party. The ten points are in bold below:

We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. This was clearly something denied to African Americans in the USA, who were legally segregated under Jim Crow; this continues to this day through policies that were never acknowledged or addressed with reparations (e.g., redlining).
We want full employment for our people. For Black people who lived through the Jim Crow era (and afterwards), there were limits to what types of jobs one could hold, where someone could work, etc.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community. The BPP was not perfect in their analysis and/or tactics; however they recognized the exploitation of working class people of all races. Now, we also have more nuanced data that shows how Black and/or Native people, particularly those who face many additional axes of oppression, are uniquely affected in North and South America and within nearly every minoritized group (i.e., LGBTQ+).
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings. In her autobiography, Coretta Scott King highlights how the housing conditions for Black people in Chicago slums were dehumanizing. The slums were often more expensive than the suburban housing afforded to white people. She writes,
“There was an old refrigerator which, once it was filled with food, would not keep the food cold or make ice. There was also a dilapidated gas stove. The temperature outside was about 15 degrees [Fareinheit], and the heat in the apartment was hardly noticeable. Rickety wooden fire escapes led down to a narrow court. For this magnificent abode Martin had to pay ninety dollars a month, unfurnished. How the poor are exploited!” – Coretta Scott King
We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society. Of course, this is something that remains to be seen in a country where books relating to race, sexuality, and/or gender continue to be banned.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service. Black people were all too used to serving on the front lines for war, yet treated as second class citizens both in the segregated military and once they returned from their service to a segregated country. Additionally, many saw the connection between US militarism and antiblackness. Muhammad Ali famously said,

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam after so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”
We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people. Since 2017, police have killed over 1,400 Black people. Black people also face the highest number of hate crimes each year (FBI Hate Crime reports from 1990 – 2019 here.)
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails. We also see an overrepresentation of Black and/or Native people who are ~13% of the country yet who make up a staggering number of those on death row (41% Black), in jails (35% Black), and in prisons (40% Black). Data on Native people is often marked as “other” or not counted at all, erasing one of our most marginalized groups and fueling anti-Indigeneity. This is a 13th amendment loophole which allowed enslavement as a punishment for crime, hence the targeted criminalization and over-policing in predominantly Black regions.
We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States. Often the juries would be exclusively white and racist. On top of this, many white people would engage in domestic terrorism by lynching if they even assumed or suspected that a Black person committed a crime (e.g., a crime like whistling at a white woman.) Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 5,000 people were lynched with over 72% of these people being Black.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. By engaging in self defense and challenging the domestic terrorism of the state, the Black Panther Party was labeled as violent “terrorists” by the FBI, who killed, abused, and incarcerated many leaders and activists even if they were non-violent. The United States conveniently left out the fact that these forms of self defense and rebellion were in response to 400+ years of enslavement, apartheid, brutalization, dehumanization, legal segregation, and oppression. It was a desperate action from a desperate people.

The United States and other imperial, colonial powers often condemn the responses to injustice as violent, but never the original source or catalyst for violence, which is undeniably imperialism, enslavement, colonialism, militarism, apartheid, and/or white supremacy.

Additionally, the folks who also spent time on the USA Terror Watch list include Nelson Mandela (until 2008), Martin Luther King Jr, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and many other brilliant activists who have resisted white supremacist violence and apartheid on a global scale. This reminder during Black History Month serves to orient ourselves in this familiar moment in time, lest we read from the same propagandized newspapers that once labeled Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr one of the most hated men in America and squirmed at his critique of the Vietnam War

Many indigenous people globally have experienced ethnic cleansing and collective punishment for resisting imperialism and colonialism. As Americans living in an imperial nation on occupied native land, our country will never formally teach us about the Kikuyu people of the Kenyan highlands, who were forced off of their homelands by the British. When some of the Kenyans organized and rebelled against the British (Mau Mau Rebellion), the white settlers grew afraid and called for punishment and action from the British army. The British adopted a policy of collective punishment to maintain power over indigenous people; if one villager was assumed to be supporting the uprising, the entire village was treated as such and destroyed. Many Kikuyu people were forced into concentration camps where thousands of people were killed and millions more faced horrific abuse and torture in the camps. At the “end” of the conflict in , over 11,000 Mau Mau anti-colonial rebels had been killed by the British army. The number of Europeans killed by Mau Mau was 32.

Many First Nations in the United States have known this type of unfathomable oppression and brutality as well. Again, we will never formally be taught about the hundreds of years of resistance efforts to colonial rule or the various ways in which leaders in North and South America tried to erase Native & Black people through miscegenation or overt propaganda and violence. For example, in the 1850s California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, advocated for a “war of extermination” against Native people. Governor Burnett set aside state money to arm local militias against Natives and, with the help of the US Army, distributed weapons so that people could murder Native people. Local governments even paid settlers for stealing horses of the Native people they murder. It is estimated that 100,000 Native people in California died during the first two years of the Gold Rush alone.

“We are also citizens of the most powerful country in the world, a country which stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth.”

— Audre Lorde

The systems that existed both then and now enable some to focus on work or hobbies without having to acknowledge that the only reason we have these luxuries is that an entire system was founded upon the dehumanization, exclusion, and exploitation of those most marginalized on a global scale. It embarrasses me to this day that academics have an air of self importance about their work when the playing field is anything but even, and where the success of the racially overrepresented is wholly dependent upon the continued exclusion and oppression of Black and/or Native people globally and other severely marginalized groups. How fragile is an ego, career, research project, or even country that necessitates others’ pain, exclusion, and/or subjugation to thrive?

I see so many parallels between the struggles for Black and/or Native liberation and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The news will share that “Israel is at war with Hamas”, yet those of us whose ancestors were trafficked to this country understand what government propaganda is and how it fuels white supremacy. We understand the tactics used to demonize the oppressed in order to justify their genocide, occupation, and displacement. The Palestinian peoples’ history, like Black and/or Native peoples’ global history, is often obscured, erased, and glossed over in favor of maintaining white, European, Zionist, East Asian, and/or Western domination.

In fact, Zionists have been incredibly clear about their mission since the 1917 Balfour declaration. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, initially wanted to create the state of Israel in either Uganda, Argentina, or Palestine and reached out to Britain for support because “the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should be easily and quickly understood in England.”

Even leading Zionists like Vladimir Jabotinsky were crystal clear about their attitudes towards the Arab population and colonialism, writing in 1923 that “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. Zionist colonisation…can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population — behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

These Zionist texts are eerily reminiscent of Manifest Destiny; an ideology that maintained that white European settlers’ “god-given” rights to settle on native peoples’ land. Like Manifest Destiny, Zionists believe that their deity gave white Jewish settlers land and rights that are not equal for Black and Brown Jewish people, Arabs, and/or Palestinians. This is reflected in Israeli law, which offers different laws to people of different ethnicities, and ongoing settler expansion and domestic terrorism in Palestinian territories. As in the documentary, “The Settlers,” we see that settler violence and illegal occupation is encouraged by the government in the same way that violence towards Black and/or Native peoples in the USA is immediately forgiven or rarely investigated.

Only a few decades ago, African Americans and Native people navigated bombings from white settlers. (MLK Jr’s home was bombed in retaliation to his fight to end segregation in 1953.) For example, African Americans experienced churches, homes, businesses, schools, or other places bombed as a form of retaliation from white Americans who did not want an end to segregation. We still see bomb threats as a form of retaliation towards HBCU’s today.

The aftermath of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which white civilians (armed and encouraged by government—much like Israeli civilians) attacked Black residents, businesses, and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood (“Black Wall Street”). More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities.

As of today, over 40,000 innocent people have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli government and settler violence in the West Bank. All 36 hospitals have been bombed as well as kindergartens, UN schools, homes, universities, aid trucks, hospitals, and places of worship. Aid trucks have been blocked by settlers and the North of Gaza is starving–a tactic Germany used to commit a holocaust against Namibians as well. Approximately 1,100 people have been killed in Israel by Hamas, a political movement that arose AFTER Israeli occupation that is not representative of all Palestinian people. Israel receives billions in military “aid” each year from the United States’ taxpayer (17 billion this year alone), supporting the “iron wall” that enables a vastly more advanced military against a state that has none.

This clearly cannot be a war when only one group has power, an army, resources, healthcare, military aid, etc. What’s more, the demonization of innocent Palestinians is vaguely reminiscent of the demonization and ongoing vilification of Black and/or Native people in the United States. Governments with vastly more power, resources, and a history of domination cannot continue to brand themselves as innocent victims and/or morally justified when they themselves have created the conditions for war, time and time again.

Critiquing Zionism is not the same thing as being antisemitic. We can critique Zionism and the Israeli government/people without being antisemitic. Hamas is not representative of all Palestinian people. Donald Trump is not representative of the entire USA. The Israeli government is not representative of all Israeli people. We can mourn the lives of Israeli and Palestinian people that were taken, while also recognizing that this grief is not shared equally by people with vastly different access to power, safety, aid, healthcare, and protection in Palestine and “Israel”. Additionally, Israeli settlers with a conscience must understand that their safety will always be in jeopardy so long as it is predicated on Palestinian displacement and apartheid—which has been the case for over 75 years.

This moment asks us to hold space for many concurrent truths at once and to not commit more harm by simplistic and reductive logic which says that any critique of Israeli government or support for Palestinians is merely antisemitism. Jewish Voice for Peace (albeit with limitations) and other organizations have shown us how oppressed peoples can show up and advocate for severely marginalized communities without engaging in Islamophobia, antisemitism, antiblackness, and/or other forms of violence.

While I’m sure most of academia may be just as silent as they were during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, I am trying to affirm to myself and others that this is not normal. This is another defining moment in history. Those of us who are privileged enough to be in academia have a responsibility to speak up, amplify Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish voices, and support our most marginalized communities in the US and globally. The community I want to be a part of is one where people speak up for what’s right no matter what the cost, because we see our liberation as deeply intertwined. I am also tired of seeing Palestinian, Black, Arab, Native, working class, etc people bear the majority of the burden for speaking up and taking action on a global scale. We see this now in the way Black and/or Arab student organizers at Harvard are being doxxed by right wing and Zionist forces.

Whether your form of action is to write to your local newspaper, blog, tell stories, read, post online, amplify Palestinian voices, call your elected officials, donate, educate yourself and others, crowdfund, protest, and/or organize, it feels imperative to commit to some form of action that centers those most severely harmed.

We cannot continue to retreat to our privilege and/or privileged spaces (academia) that are predominantly white, light skinned and/or East Asian by design. Doing so enables us to forget that we, too, are on occupied Native land in a country that has never given reparations to Black and/or Native people for centuries of displacement, enslavement, segregation, and continued domestic terrorism. Our systems still disproportionately harm Black and/or Native people within and beyond the USA, and we all have a responsibility to educate ourselves and avoid repeating the same mistakes as those who came before us.

Jewish Voices for Peace: “End Israel’s Occupation of Palestine”

Call your Representatives and Demand Ceasefire! (Per request by people in Gaza!)

Ten Films to Watch to Learn More about Israeli Occupation & Life in Gaza

Radical Black Feminist Reading List on Palestine

Palestinian Youth Movement LinkTree

The Settlers – Human Rights Watch Film **** HIGHLY RECOMMEND

TANTURA – Documentary about Israel’s massacres in 1948

Israelism – $5 to watch online by Jewish filmmakers

June Jordan Poetry for Palestine

Haymarket Books – Free eBooks for a Free Palestine

Palestine Academy – lessons to learn more about Palestinian history

“100 years war on Palestine” by Rashid Khalidi