Book Review - Up Against the Wall

I’ve just finished reading Curtis J. Austin’s Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (2006).  Austin’s research into this storyline of the struggle for equality for black people in America is in depth.  He spoke at length with original sources, people who were in the Black Panther Party (BPP) and survived.  His description of his encounters with Elaine Brown are especially poignant.

This review is really my reaction.  I inhabit the group that for centuries subjugated people of color (POC) – white, middle class, educated males.  The animosity felt toward whites by the founders of the BPP is understandable, if white people accept our role in institutional prejudice, or at least accept that we have benefited from privilege that we have not earned.  It makes sense that there were black people who did not buy into the Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent resistance.  Lynchings, abuse by the authorities, and lack of opportunities afforded to whites from the 1960’s up through to today are born of violence, perpetuated by those in power (whites), and victimize POC’s. 

My own feelings from reading the book are sorrow and regret.  I am sorry my ancestors maintained a system that kept an entire group of people as an underclass.  I hate it. 

However, I also know that many whites today are ignorant of the injustices of Jim Crow and don’t want to be educated.  Many whites today want equality, they say, but they don’t want to give anything up for it.  They don’t want to hear why black people are so angry; angry enough to espouse the violence that was policy for the BPP.  I have had maddening conversations with educated white people who simply will not acknowledge the existence of white privilege or that they have benefited from it. 

A mantra I hear from black friends in the struggle for equality (or equity) is “If you see something, say something.”  In other words, if you, a white person, see another white say or do something racially insensitive, confront that person.  However, when I’ve done that it leads to the other white person acting defensively and never gaining any insight into his or her own privilege.  Whatever sense of entitlement he or she felt that enabled him to say or do the racially insensitive thing is only magnified when I confront him.  Maybe I am just not good at the conversation.  But I also think a lot of white people aren’t interested in the conversation. 

This lack of drive for equity and a racially equal society, this callous indifference from whites, is the fuel to the fire that burned in Huey Newton and Elderidge Cleaver and the others who led the BPP from a place of anger.  I hope society is in a better place or at least moving toward a better place.  The events in Charlottesville, VA (summer 2017) are either a sign that we are as racially divided as ever, or the last gasps of a dying racism.  I hope it is the latter, but I fear it is the former.  If I that is so, then Antifa is a modern day incarnation of reactionaries driven by the same rage that drove the BPP.