The Violence of Belonging
Say plainly what the New Black Panther Party believes, because plain language is where the disgust actually lives — euphemism protects ideas from scrutiny, and this idea doesn't deserve protection. Their own literature calls a Black person who marries or loves outside their race a collaborator, a modern-day descendant of Uncle Tom. Their past national spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, stood in front of crowds and said there was no such thing as a good white person — that if you ever found one, the correct response was violence, before he could "change." Their members have carried this into the world armed: in 2008, two of them stood outside a Philadelphia polling place, one holding a nightstick, to intimidate voters. This is not a rhetorical excess you can wave away as street theater. It is an organization that has told you, in its own words and its own actions, exactly what it thinks a person's blood entitles them to and what it entitles you to do to people who don't share it.
Strip away the beret and the borrowed name and what's left is a founding premise: that ancestry is destiny, that mixing is treason, that an entire race carries a guilt no individual member of it can ever pay down. That is not adjacent to the Klan's premise. It is the same premise, pointed the other direction. The Klan was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the winter of 1865 and 1866, out of a handful of defeated Confederate veterans who turned a social club into a terror campaign almost overnight, because the actual political goal was never a secret: put Reconstruction in the ground and put Black political power in the ground alongside it. It came back a second time in 1915 with the same core belief dressed in new hatreds — Catholics, Jews, immigrants added to the list of contamination — and a third time during the civil rights era, when burning a cross was still a way of telling a Black family exactly whose blood the neighborhood belonged to. Every revival of the Klan, across a century and a half, has rested on one unchanging idea: that white blood was pure and needed defending from contamination. The NBPP has built its politics on the mirror image of that same idea — that racial purity is virtue and racial mixing is corruption, just with the colors reversed. An idea does not become less monstrous because the people now holding it were once the targets of it. If you would call it evil for a white organization to declare that a person "isn't really one of us anymore" once they marry outside their race, you have already conceded that the idea itself is the evil — not the direction it happens to be pointed in this decade. Suffering can explain how a person arrives at an ugly belief. It cannot launder the belief once they're holding it.
And here is what should actually make you furious, more than the ideology itself: this group is wearing a stolen inheritance, and the theft is worse once you know what the original Party actually was — not a clean thing, not a myth, but something that had already paid in its own blood for the right to be taken seriously. In May 1969, Panthers in the New Haven chapter tortured and murdered Alex Rackley, a nineteen-year-old member of their own chapter, on the belief that he was an informant. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins stood trial for it. Five years later, Huey Newton — the man who co-founded the Party — shot and killed a seventeen-year-old girl for calling him by a nickname he hated, then fled the country to escape prosecution. Elaine Brown, who became the Party's chairwoman in 1974, wrote afterward about what it cost the women inside that organization to keep it running while the men who spoke publicly about liberation sidelined them, and in documented cases beat them, inside their own ranks. None of that is a footnote, and none of it should be softened. The Party was capable of real cruelty toward its own people, born of paranoia, siege, and the ordinary human rot that grows inside any group that starts eating itself from the inside. But that cruelty was never organized around a belief that ancestry determined worth. It was violence in service of survival and control, ugly and indefensible on its own terms — not violence in service of a doctrine that says an entire race is collectively guilty or that love across a color line is betrayal. That distinction is the whole case. The original Party could be brutal and still never once tell you that your blood decided whether you belonged. The NBPP tells you exactly that, in writing, as its founding idea.
Bobby Seale — a man who was tried for his life, who buried friends the FBI helped kill, who has more standing to speak on this than anyone alive — called the New Black Panther Party a racist hate group, in exactly those words, to its face. The Huey P. Newton Foundation said publicly that the party it represents was never built on hatred of white people, only on love for Black people, and that whoever built this new thing had built something else entirely. Fred Hampton is dead — murdered in his bed by Chicago police in 1969 — and the last thing he built before that happened was a coalition with poor white Southerners who had nothing and nobody else fighting for them either. He did that without asking any of them to prove their whiteness didn't disqualify them. The NBPP took the name of a man who died proving that oppression and race-hatred are not the same fight, and used it to build an organization on the one premise he spent his life refusing.
Call it what it is — grave robbery, not exactly inheritance. And it should disgust you exactly as much as the Klan does — not because the two have inflicted equal damage on the world, they plainly have not, but because the thing underneath both of them is identical: a belief that a person's worth, loyalty, and right to belong can be settled by looking at their blood. Scale tells you how much harm an idea has managed to do. It doesn't tell you whether the idea is rotten. This one is rotten no matter how small the group holding it is.
Marni Fraser
08|26|2026
Image by Wallace Chuck, edited by me.
