On Suspicion of Being Black
One of the stimulating aspects of American life which led to the origination of the Black Panthers was systemic racism within law enforcement. The descriptions of life for Black Americans dealing with the police in the 1960s strike a disturbing familiarity. A tragic irony of the text is that one could lift any of the myriad accounts of interaction between police and Black citizens in the 1960s and place it verbatim into an article about modern day law enforcement.
Civilized Enslavement
Often, the irony in the narrative is not really intended as such. In fact, many times irony occurs within descriptive prose intended solely for the purpose of conveying literal truths. Facts have a funny way of investing the truth with irony:
“The first Black people to set foot on North American soil were brought to these shores unwillingly…The Europeans considered their culture and language and laws more advanced, more civilized, and just plain better than that of the brown-skinned people”
Except in Dixie and Vietnam
The Black Panthers scared a lot of white people in the 1960s. And not entirely absent of intent. The visual image forwarded by the members intellectually devised in part for the purpose of instilling disquiet among white America. The reaction was predictable, of course: Accusations that the Panthers were entirely and exclusively an organization committed to attaining their goals through violence. Which, also predictably, inevitably led to the most ironic assertion possible in the decade noted for the Vietnam War abroad and the “Mississippi Burning” murders at home:
“Violence is never the answer.”
Women
The iconic image of a Black Panther for many people—and certainly most white people at the time—was a sullen Black male raising a militant closed fist wearing a black beret and military-style clothing. Ironically, two-thirds of the membership of the Black Panther Party was comprised of women.
J. Edgar and the Gang
When it comes to systemic racism within law enforcement, the top offenders were not local police forces headed by Sheriffs who were sheet-carrying members of the KKK, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Director J. Edgar Hoover was especially scared of the Black Panthers and created an entire propaganda campaign to discredit them before they could attain enough power to break all the laws Hoover feared they were planning. Ironically, the FBI itself broke more laws investigating the Black Panthers than the Party itself ever managed to commit.
