TheLoop21.com

By: Michael E. Ross (Add to your loop)
Mon, 07/27/2009 - 00:00

The New Black Panther Party isn't as visible as the original.

The Black Panther Party, formed just more than 40 years ago, was once the enfant terrible of the black liberation movement, challenging police and governmental authorities in sometimes violent confrontations that distilled the antagonisms of the black American experience of the 1960's.

Since then, the Panthers have been on the periphery of the national radar, seen as an angry but finally toothless relic of the past, as harmless as the peace signs and flower power that document the era.

But the new Current TV video Black Panthers in the Age of Obama, featuring interviews with two former Black Panthers, shows the Panthers aren't finished. They still have a lot to say, including an opinion that — in a departure from the feelings of many African Americans — Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president fundamentally changes nothing.

“This is an evil system,” Roland Freeman says. “It says, ‘in God we trust,’ but you know and I know that God ain’t nowhere in the mix. … President Obama … wants to perpetuate this evil system, he wants this evilness to continue.”

It’s hard today not to hear cynicism in Freeman’s comments, especially in light of the changes beyond Obama’s election that have occurred in this country in the years since the Panthers took point in black America.

Freeman may disagree, but in some respects, the Black Panthers’ insistence on strength of the black community, pride in the African American experience, and total commitment to change for black Americans, were factors that helped make Barack Obama’s presidency not just possible but, ultimately, inevitable.

Their message and that of the Panthers’ philosophical antecedent, Malcolm X, were at first incendiary and confrontational, but later more moderated and outreach-oriented. They reinforced in the minds of 1960’s-era Americans the idea that black people would be heard, that their contributions would not be marginalized.

Without that message being internalized in the hearts of black Americans then and in the generations since, Obama’s election could not have happened.

The fact that it did happen is a renunciation of cynicism, and an unprecedented vote of confidence in the American ideal.

But that hardly lets President Obama off the hook.

“I voted for him,” Freeman says. “I was proud, I never thought I’d see it happen. But after it did happen, I have not really seen any kind of change and I don’t think I’m going to see any kind of change, because basically … he’s a politician.”

Implicit in Freeman’s criticism is a call for the president to walk the walk. It’s Obama’s job now to get true social and political change to trickle down to the bedrock of black America — a bedrock represented by the bold brothers interviewed in the video. It’s on the 44th president of the United States to prove their cynicism about the United States is misplaced.

Veteran journalist Michael E. Ross has worked at The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, msnbc.com and elsewhere; and was formerly an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. His writing has also appeared in The Times Book Review, Essence, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Konch, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Root, PopMatters and other publications. Author of the novel Flagpole Days (2003), and the essay collection Interesting Times (2004), he contributed to the anthologies MultiAmerica (1997), and Soul Food (2000). His newest collection of Weblogs and essays, American Bandwidth, will be published in the summer of 2009.
 

Is Obama compromising too much in the health care bill?

Yes, we need public option

No, he's keeping the peace

Republicans will block it anyway

Let's wait until the health care summit

I don't know