Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, I’ve found myself disconnected from history. It’s as though that event and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, marches, and messaging helped me wake up and look around for the first time. Words and phrases like “check your privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “police brutality,” suddenly had meaning to me. I know I’ve heard them before because I’ve rewatched favorite movies from the ’90s and those phrases, concepts, and morbid jokes stand out with shining clarity to me now, but I admit that for the majority of my life those things were just noise about a distant past, a distant place—assuming I heard/understood them at all.
I had a decent education as a kid, but I keep finding these holes in how I understand and relate to history. It is probably intentionally disconnected—maybe not because of my teachers, but because of larger policies and initiatives—as a means of protecting and reinforcing the system that puts white Christians at the top of the power structures. That's why when I saw that YouTube was recommending a video from a former Black Panther titled, "How We Stop This Without Tearing America Apart," I was intrigued and a little skeptical (sad to say, but it's honest).
The Black Panthers...what do I know about them? Something around the 1960s...oh yeah, and they were violent or something. The bad guys in the Civil Rights Movement. That's what my brain recovered from my American History classes. But "that's what the government wants you to think." (That was my favorite thing to say after someone said anything when I was a teenager...except now it holds water in this specific instance!)
Let's clear this up just a little bit before we go on to this former Black Panther's message—which I found to be wise, profound, and exactly what I needed to hear after the last few weeks of ICE murders and other horrendous acts by government agencies.
Black Panther Party
Black leaders committed to racial justice represented a threat to white supremacy and became targets of law enforcement harassment and attack even when they advocated nonviolence. Beginning in 1963, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader" and destroy his image as a "potential messiah" to unify Black activists.
When a younger generation began to steer the movement in a different direction, law enforcement repression intensified.
Originally started as the "Black Panther Party for Self Defense," this group was created partially as a response and a challenge to police brutality after police killed a young, unarmed black man, Matthew Johnson, in California (see Wikipedia).
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. Spurning the tactics of marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, the Panthers founded youth centers and free breakfast programs and organized legally armed patrols to prevent police brutality. President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly condemned the concept of "Black Power" that the Panthers symbolized.
The rise of militant Black activism and its rejection by white stakeholders emboldened law enforcement officials to employ controversial — and sometimes deadly — tactics. In August 1967, the FBI officially directed COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist groups. In July 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover named the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
COINTELPRO was an FBI counterintelligence program "focused on 'domestic threats,' including civil rights activists" (EJI, pg 99). So I finally understand why I felt skeptical and had that looming sense of distrust when I think about the Black Panthers—the government was successful in discrediting them (and others) and that's a hard message to detangle even 50 years later. All the more reason to give this creator a listen, I reasoned, because if I've learned anything in the last 6 years, it's that I should listen to the voices I'm most afraid of, not just the ones I'm comfortable with (there's nuance to that, but hopefully you catch the spirit of that idea).
"We weren't fighting white people, we were fighting oppression."
This message was so impactful to me, because I've been deeply afraid of the outcome of the
For that, I invite you to watch the entire video (only 15 minutes). I'll have some of his profound insights quoted below with a few of my notes, but it will be best understood in the entire context of his message.
"Oppression is a system. Oppression uses people. Oppression convinces ordinary citizens to protect it. That distinction matters because the moment you forget it, you become what you're fighting."
Violence did not liberate us. It made the cost unbearable. The overwhelm and harm did not fall on the institutions. It fell on us, the people. That's why I am not romanticizing that era.
The cost of violence is not something I think about a lot. I grew up in a group that loves phrases like, “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six,” signaling that fighting first is the best course of action; Take before you’re taken. But that is the stance of the powerful against the oppressed. When the oppressed fight back, they are harmed twice—from the initial harm to the judgment and punishment for their actions, even when those actions are ultimately caused by the oppressive system.
I am warning against repeating it because what might have felt unavoidable then would destroy us now. I want you to understand something crucial. The conditions that existed when I was young do not exist today. Back then, power was hidden. Information was slow. Abuse could be denied. If something happened in one city, the rest of the country may never even hear about it.
Today, that is no longer true. Every action is recorded. Every response is documented. Every mistake is replayed. That changes the equation completely. In the past, escalation forced attention. Today, escalation forfeits legitimacy. Violence no longer exposes injustice. It obscures it. And once legitimacy is lost, the people lose leverage. That is why I am telling you plainly, what worked under oppression then would empower oppression now.
Let me explain this carefully. Governments do not fear chaos. They prepare for it. They train for it. They budget for it. They justify expansion through it. Chaos gives cover. Chaos allows emergency powers. Chaos allows suspension of norms. And chaos allows the silencing of dissent. Order without justice is dangerous. But chaos without strategy is a gift to authority. That is why the loudest calls for violence only come from people who would never pay the price for it. The people who pay are families, communities, young men and women with no exit.
The most radical message I've received from watching this and the other videos on this channel is that real, human, community-based connections really do matter. His initial call to action in the wake of ICE and Minnesota is to reach out to your neighbors who are police or national guard. These people don't belong to the agencies, they belong to communities. They're real people, and we remind them that ultimately they belong to us when we treat them as neighbors, friends, and family.
Humanity in action is community. Community is safety.