PANTHER PERSPECTIVES TO EMPOWER THE PEOPLE: A DIALOGUE ON ALL THINGS BLACK AND REVOLUTIONARY (2025) A conversation between Kevin “Rashid” Johnson and Halisi Olugbala Uhuru

A conversation between Kevin “Rashid” Johnson and Halisi Olugbala Uhuru

RASHID: Comrade Halisi, many of us agree that there’s a major need for conversations about the New Afrikan (Black) community, our relationships, and things related to us as a people from a grassroots perspective – and that these conversations need to be honest, positive, critical and empowering. This is because as generations have passed a great deal has been lost to our people, both in terms of our conditions and our consciousness. Which has stemmed from the way we have been treated and influenced by and in this society, how we have come to see ourselves as a result, and how our genuine leaders have come under attack and have been lost to us. We’ve lost our self respect, love for ourselves, our sense of identity and community; we’ve become addicted to escapism, self directed violence, substance abuse, meaningless materialism and have internationalized inferiority complexes to the point that we cast ourselves in the image of everyone but our natural selves and many of us have come to reject our own people as intimate partners. Many of us undoubtedly suffer a PTSD-type of condition resulting from the traumatic experiences of living in Amerika.

We need to speak to the need of love and unity between the Black woman and man in our ongoing struggles against this predatory U.S. capitalist imperialist and white supremacist system; and how and why we must successfully heal from these experiences. But to win we need unity not just between our women and men, but between our people as a whole beyond intimate relations and traditional gender relations; and we need to unite with all other oppressed peoples.

Not only have you and I witnessed these conditions and their negative effects on our people, but we’ve both personally experienced and been impacted by them. Which has lent to both our personal growth and developed strengths in identifying true friends and the real enemy and standing with the oppressed. IT IS WHY WE HAVE BECOME PANTHERS.

It is therefore important that we make ourselves available to the people as Panthers to share our insights, experiences and strategies to help the people and continue in our growth and service to them.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!

Rashid

HALISI: Rashid, I’m 33 years old, and I’ve been on these plantations since I was 15, both on the state (Virginia DOC) and federal (FBOP) levels. Before that, I was in the streets, wrapped up in gangbangin’ (tribalism) and hustlin’ (illegitimate capitalism). Even during my bid, I was wrapped up in tribalism and illegimate capitalism. I know for a fact that no one is a community if no one is taught to love, respect and be loyal to each other. Where are we taught that in the New Afrikan (Black) community? I was never taught that coming up. My parents didn’t teach it to me, my schools never taught it to me, none of the famous rappers ever taught it to me, and my life in the streets never taught it to me. None of my homies were taught this either. I was taught, and we were taught, to love, respect and be loyal to the mob, to the hood, and to the code (no snitching, no bitching, and no switching). That’s it. Nothing more nothing less. Ma Dukes taught me the Bible, good manners (say “yes, sir”, ” yes, ma’am “), do good in school, work a job, but nothing concerning who we are as a people, and certainly nothing about loving, respecting or being loyal to my people. The schools definitely didn’t teach it. At school, after pledging allegiance to this country, singing the national anthem, and saluting the Yankee rag, we learned math, science, language arts, and white history. And then during Black History month, we learned about the peanut man George Washington Carver, Rosa Parks not giving up her seat, and Martin Luther King Jr’s ” I Have A Dream” speech. We were slaves, there was a war, we were freed, things were unfair for awhile down South, but Amerika got it together, passed a law, and now everything is perfect. That’s what school taught me.

So, Comrade, what can we really expect from our people when nothing is teaching us or showing us or organizing us into being a community? There is more community in the street tribes (gangs) than in the Black population. It’s no wonder why so many of us don’t care about each other, our history, our struggle, etc.

In the hoods and in the prisons, only 3 things matter: money, power and respect, and I could dig that if it was actually based on an understanding of Collective Wealth, People’s Power, and Respect for ourselves, families, communities, traditions, and history. But of course, we know it’s not. It’s based on the Scarface movie. At the root of all the social dysfunction you named in your letter, I believe, is this fundamental lack of education concerning loving, respecting, and being loyal to our people as Black brothers and sisters sharing the same struggle. We have to recognize that we are one people, and learn to love, respect and be loyal to one another, seeing that our individual survival and success is tied to the collective survival and success of our people as a whole. From this basis of being a people and caring about our community, we can then recognize the problems affecting us all and get organized against it. But if there is no community, no love, respect or loyalty between us, then my problems are simply my
problems and your problems are your problems, and since we are all just individuals surviving for ourselves, it becomes nothing to exploit you, finesse you, rob you, scam you, sell drugs to you, beat you, or kill you to get ahead and meet my needs. That is where we are at with it right now, Comrade. We have to bring community (common-unity) back to our communities.

All Power to the People!

Halisi

RASHID: To get to the root of a problem you’ve got to know the source. It’s almost reductionist to some minds that we can trace all our problems as a people to a single cause: namely, this predatory capitalist imperialist system and the tiny group of men who create and benefit from it.

Everything we’ve been taught originated from those who control this system, and its institutions of influence which includes the media (information and entertainment), schools, religious institutions and so on. It is cultural influences that stem from the forces that control the life blood (economy) of society. They are the ones who control its institutions and means of enforcing power politically, militarily, culturally and historically (or what is taught and told as history). This is why the people must take and maintain control of these things in order for them to serve the interests of the masses.

That we don’t control these systems is why we know nothing about ourselves – the forces that have always exploited and subjugated us are the same ones who tell us who we are, his to see the world, what to think of ourselves, what value we have (or don’t have). It does them no service to teach us things that will create cohesion and unite us, that will build trust and cooperation among us, or generate senses of self worth, self awareness, self confidence, self love within us.

Like plantation slaves, to submit to and serve the owner we must be taught at every turn to love and trust only him but to hate and distrust each other, to aspire to please him, to accept him and seek his acceptance, to fear him but vent our anger and insecurity against our own. These are the values you see and describe that plague our communities and are reflected in now we act towards and treat each other. As you point out we HAVE NEVER been taught any better, as with any child, you can’t blame or punish them for what they have never been taught. The blame lies with the teacher, the misleader.

This miseducation has been passed down and foisted on us from the earliest days of our oppression, from during chattel slavery, to Jim Crow segregation, to modern urbanized and razor wire imprisonment.

I recall in reading the escaped slave Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, how the slave owners would teach the slaves to beat on and box each other (even for the owner’s entertainment), but made them fear to raise a hand against them and the overseers. In fact Douglass remarked how it was a liberating experience when he rose up and fought his brutal overseer back AND BEAT HIM. This emboldened him, revived in him his very human worth, and ultimately gave him the audacity and will to escape slavery to become a champion of the struggle against slavery. Conditioned self-hatred and self-directed violence are essential elements in conditioning a people to submit to oppression, abuse and exploitation.

We are a particularly feared people by the owners of this system. We have proven not only to be a particularly volatile internal element in this society when aroused in anger and disillusionment with our conditions, but also a unifying and leading force that proves capable of arising and joining with others’ resistance, even with disaffected elements from among the very people who have historically excluded and violently policed us for the owners of society. AND THE RULING CLASS IS FEARFUL OF THIS ABOVE ALL ELSE. This is why we are and must be kept by them in a state of division, ignorance and confusion, and for those of us who have some exposure to information that might awaken them, they are bought off with privileges, profits and petty power roles to serve as tokens and neocolonial agents to mislead and control the rest of us.

Comrade George Jackson understood the liberating power of building love between us, which prompted him to speak many times in his book BLOOD IN MY EYE about our need to relearn how to love and trust each other, of the imperative need for the Black woman and man to be united in our liberation struggle – he understood the paralyzing and destructive effects on our liberation struggles and our very communities of the internalized hate, envy, fear, distrust, and all those backstabbing values we’ve been taught and retaught at every turn.

Everything we struggled for fifty years ago to uplift and unite us, the entertainment industry now teaches us the exact opposite of, and rewards with money and promotions for those who portray these ass-backward images and sing and rap these ass-backward ideas and values to us.

Where else and to what other people do you see these industries promote massive killing of a people, their drug addiction, degrading their women, and so on? If it were done to Jews for example, the major industry promoters and executives would be denounced as antisemitic. Where we resisted the degradation, sexualization and disrespect of Black women fifty years ago, today through every platform Black women are degraded, hyper-sexualized, disrespected. We don’t even dance anymore as an art form, all one sees is Black women twerking.

We fought against the image and history of what was done to Sarah Baartman, the Afrikan woman who was caged and paraded by racist South Afrikan whites as a sexualized freakshow attraction because of the shape and dimensions of her hips and buttocks. This exemplified and was resisted by us as the epitome of dehumanization, sexualization, and colonization of the Black body. Now the very thing our women are encouraged to flaunt in videos and every other platform for money and recognition is their hips and buttocks and twerking.

I mean the Black women portrayed by the entertainment media today to be admired and emulated by our children are the likes of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion (in the latter case a woman whose very name implies the dimensions of her butt and heightened sexual potency). It was the height of insult and spoke to where they want us to see our value that Kamala Harris felt need to have Megan Thee Stallion perform at her major Atlanta rally as the Democratic presidential nominee.

All of this is part of a systemic process of suppressing and replacing our own cultural life with that of our oppressor and enemy. As the esteemed Afrikan revolutionary leader and theorist Amilcar Cabral observed,

“History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his dominion on a people. But it likewise teaches us that, whatever the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned. Implantation of domination can be ensured definitively only by physical elimination of a significant portion of the dominated people.”

We see this reduction and suppression of our numbers by the massive imprisonment of our fertile-aged males where they are isolated from our women and forbidden to reproduce. While we are culturally conditioned to degrade and not love our women, and they in turn are conditioned to distance themselves from us, seeking to be “independent.” Then killing each other is glorified.

Yes, we must revive and relearn love, mutual support, and common-unity (community) among ourselves, and not for the sake of cultural ascetics but our very survival and liberation.

All Power to the People!

Rashid