Steve Biko to Black Lives Matter: The evolution of black political movements

On the 49th anniversary of the formation of the Black Panther Party the revolutionary ideas of the Panthers seem more important than ever with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. After all there has been an increasing overlap between some sections of the Black Lives Matter movement in a broad sense and some rather unsavoury characters who claim the mantle of the Panthers, calling themselves the New Black Panthers. This association has been picked up on by a few right wing blogs and news outlets intent on denigrating the movement as a whole.

The original Black Panther Party formed in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale as a challenge to the liberal notion that equality was achieved through the legal equalisation of blacks and whites in America. Drawing on Marxism, the Panthers demanded not just the legal equality that formed the basis of the Civil Rights Movement, but also economic justice for the impoverished black population. 

Of course this combination of black nationalism and Maoist national liberation was not merely restricted to the US. The example of apartheid South Africa and Steve Biko offers us an imperfect but useful parallel when examining the evolution of anti-racist black political movements.

In response to the grotesque racism of apartheid South Africa, black student Steve Biko started an intellectual movement, known as the Black Consciousness Movement. Black Consciousness was an assertive attempt to overthrow what Biko described as a 'psychological feeling of inferiority which was deliberately cultivated by the system.' Biko, like the Black Panthers believed that anti-racism movements should be composed solely of blacks as cooperation tended result in whites dominating the any given group. In short they believed that blacks had to emancipate themselves before they could participate with whites on an even basis.

Today the New Black Panthers Party who proclaim to follow in the footsteps of older black nationalists, take a theoretically similar but much more vulgar approach. They too advocate the separation of the races but in a much more fundamental way; they actively promote a separate state for the black peoples of America, not dissimilar to KKK policy. Furthermore, in the wake of Dylann Roof's murderous rampage New Panther leader Malik Zulu Shabazz called for retributive killings of white people. By promoting black separateness and violence against whites the New Black Panther Party represents a mere inversion of the violent white racism they claim to abhor.

Biko on the other hand recognised that racial politics were only a temporary measure and in many respects his empowering racial politics of the 1970s paved the way for the non-racial ANC to break the back of the apartheid state. Biko and the Black Panthers recognised that racism cannot be defeated by accepting the fundamental premise of the white racist, namely that black and white people are not meant to live together. Racial politics can only be justified as a temporary measure; a philosophy whose ultimate aim has to be its own annulment through the realisation of the goals it set out to achieve.

Bennie Khoapa, an architect of Black Consciousness said 'history has charged us with the cruel responsibility of going to the very gate of racism in order to destroy racism- to the gate and no further'. The zealots in the New Black Panther Party seek to kick those gates down and forge a new society, every bit as repugnant as the one they protest against. It is vitally important that Black Lives Matter actively resist the attempted cooption of actively racist groups and continue the noble struggle of non-racial resistance.