WHITE PRIVILEGE AND THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLES OF PEOPLE OF COLOR (2024) By Kevin ”Rashid” Johnson

When whites who witnessed the brutal reality of Blacks suffering at the hands of the U.S capitalist imperialist and white supremacist system asked Huey P. Newton how they could help, he told them to go and start a White Panther Party to give revolutionary leadership to their own people, following the example of the Black Panther Party.

Huey’s advice reflected a lesson learned at great cost, that oppressed people must lead their own liberation struggles and that of those who traditionally oppressed them.

How many times have the struggles of Afrikan people, both on the Continent and throughout the Diaspora, been betrayed or sabotaged by ‘well meaning’ privileged whites imposing their own ideas on who should lead us and how? These whites often chose which Blacks they would lend resources, support and credibility to as our leaders. Most often these chosen Blacks were those who placated these whites; who uncritically submitted to their control, agendas and ideas; or who allowed these whites to use them to give themselves undue credit as having built a Black support base and alliances that they actually didn’t have and hadn’t earned, or simply because they could control these Blacks and use them to promote their own ideas in Blackface? They neither represent the interests of the oppressed nor speak with their voices.

This is both capitalist methodology and white supremacy writ large and Huey recognized its dangers. We must remember that we are not struggling against capitalist imperialism alone, but also against white supremacy and racial chauvinism.

Indeed it was to win approval and appease the ‘moral’ sensitivities of white liberals that Black civil rights leaders promoted Rosa Parks as the face of the anti-segregation Montgomery bus boycott, instead of women like Mary Louise Smith and Claudette Covin, both of whom had already received national attention for being arrested for refusing to give up their seats to white men on segregated Montgomery, Alabama buses months before Rosa Parks did the same. These women weren’t endorsed by civil rights lawyers and liberal whites because Claudette was an unwed pregnant teenager and Mary’s father was rumored to be an alcoholic. So unlike Rosa Parks, who was seen as a genteel, moral and quiet mulatto woman, their images weren’t acceptable to white ethical pretensions.

In her book THE NEW JIM CROW, attorney Michelle Alexander spoke to this issue, and how, despite the inherent and obvious injustices and racism of U.S. mass imprisonment, the causes of prisoners, because of their status as convicted criminals, receive little support from liberals, civil rights lawyers and the white left.

As she stated:

”The time-tested strategy of using those who epitomize moral virtue as symbols in racial justice campaigns is far more difficult to employ in efforts to reform the criminal justice system. Most people who are caught up in the criminal justice system have less than flawless backgrounds. While many black people get stopped and searched for crimes they did not commit, it is not so easy these days to find young black men in urban areas who have never been convicted of a crime. The new caste system labels black and brown men as criminals early, often in their teens, making them ‘damaged goods’ from the perspective of traditional civil rights advocates. With criminal records, the majority of blacks in urban areas are not seen as attractive plaintiffs for civil rights litigation or good ‘poster boys’ for media advocacy.”

This reality is further evidenced by the fact that those prisoners who do receive such support and recognition, are typically those who were imprisoned for ‘political’ not purely criminal acts or those who adamantly deny guilt of their convicted crimes.

The problem with this is people of color are criminalized by the very fact of our existence in Amerika and the need of the status quo to justify our marginalization, brutal police containment, and mass disposal into prisons where we pose less of a threat to resisting this foul imperialist system. Not to mention that our living conditions, social neglect, economic exclusion and denial of access to needed basic resources compel many of us to resort to criminalistic lifestyles to survive and cope. And not just this, but Huey recognized that the advances in automation and technology that see machines taking jobs driven by the profit interests of the ruling class was pushing huge numbers of urbanized people out of employment and forcing them into criminalistic (lumpen) lifestyles in order to survive. It was these very people that the BPP was developed to politicize and organize to lead the fight to overthrow this socially destructive system.

Not just once have I witnessed and experienced white liberals and leftists sow division within, sabotage or undermine support groups and networks that I personally helped develop to bring help and attention to the rank injustices and abuses of prisoners, because they disagreed with my political views, were offended by my criticisms or flash of my temper when they betrayed the trust and needs of abused prisoners, or found me uncouth and unrefined compared to those who came to prison as politically conscious ‘activists.’

Well, like George Jackson, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton and others of our political leaders with lumpen origins, I unapologetically am from and represent the underclass, the unprivileged, and the ‘deviant’ element from the streets. I have not always been kind, gentle or moral. I am NOT a Rosa Parks. I emphasized this in the preface of my autobiography which I began writing many months ago. In fact a major aim in me writing my story is to show the reactionary backward person that I was and the principled person committed to serving the people that I’ve become as a result of my exposure to and practicing revolutionary politics, history and culture – it is a story of the redeeming power of revolution and the corrupting nature of capitalism and its institutions and culture. The person that I was reflects the world and class base that I came from while the person that I am reflects the communist world we aspire to build tomorrow. I have no fear nor shame of my background, who I am, and anything I have done, nor of the person I have become.

I do not and will not seek to appease the armchair and opportunist leftists who are looking for a Black figurehead or token who satisfies their artificial standards of moral purity. In my past I have killed, I have peddled drugs, I have hurt many people, I have been violently homophobic, I have exploited and disrespected women. I am the genuine article. I have no shame of anything I’ve done and have never tried to hide who I am. I am self-critical of my past, and have found and seek redemption in my political life. This is the process of remolding that we aspire to lead our lumpen subclass through, of ”Transforming the criminal mentality into a revolutionary mentality.”

It has only been the pigs, rats and turncoats who have tried to use my past and outright pig-generated fabrications to discredit who I am now and it means nothing to me. Those who live and struggle around and with me have always vouched for my sincerity, character and commitment to the common people, not the privileged, nor those who would use me to advance their own agendas which differ substantially from the interests of the masses.

I remain committed to this work and undeterred by the pigs, career rats, and scorned people who’ve turned into sabateurs and informants, or those who take offense to me, my past, my politics, and the fact that I put the well being of the people before the feelings of thin-skinned privileged whites and petty bourgeois ”house negroes” (which includes those negroes who are afraid to leave the comfort and safety of their own homes and join the people in the streets where the real suffering and struggle are).

Huey got so much right in his dialectical grasp of this decadent imperialist system, the massive numbers of people being forced into poverty and the margins by this system, and their need of revolutionary political leadership and that it must be drawn from their own ranks and not from white or Black privileged sectors.

And while we unite with all who can be united in this fight against the common enemy, the oppressed must lead our own struggles aimed at destroying this devious system and pool our resources and labor power to build this struggle, resources that the privileged have had preferential access to and often used as a mechanism to choose, manipulate and control our movements, organizations and leaders and water down our politics. This is the driving aim of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party and Pantherism.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!