Survival Pending Revolution: What the Black Panthers Can Teach the US Food Movement

INSTITUTE FOR FOOD AND DEVELOPMENT POLICY SUMMER 2012 VOLUME 18 • NUMBER 2 Panther, Jerry Dunigan talking with children at a free breakfast Survival Pending Revolution: What the Black Panthers Can Teach the US Food Movement By Raj Patel Over the past decade, the US food movement has grown to become a potent force for social change. Precisely because of its success, the movement now is being called to shore up the status quo. Revisiting some radical roots suggests ways that the food movement can end hunger in America, rather than becoming just another band-aid alleviating poverty. It’s no accident that the food movement grew widely after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. With the criminalization of dissent, it became increasingly difficult to confront corporate capitalism through other politics. As Michael Pollan has noted, Food is the place in daily life where corporatization can be most vividly felt… By the same token, food offers us one of the shortest, most appealing paths out of the corporate labyrinth. Under the Bush regime, environmentalists, social justice campaigners, anti-capitalists, and organic foodies found a government, media, and general public far less responsive than a decade before. Membership of umbrella groups like the Community Food Security Coalition swelled, with a proliferation of food organizations, consultants, academics, and activist groups throughout the US. Part of the success of the movement has been its largely nonsectarian, big-tent approach, committed to the idea that food should be available to all, and that, above all, food is a domain in which something can and ought swiftly to be done. Indeed, it’s the very success of community farms, gardens, feeding programs, kitchens, and state police, with attendant and provision of these services, Newton and food banks that has helped systematic police violence against understood the ambiguities and recruit a new generation of activists black men. It was the encounter contradictions within the programs: into a movement that seems to with this “police logic” that spurred offer transcendence from the “old two students at Merritt College in All these programs satisfy the politics.” Oakland, Huey Newton and Bobby deep needs of the community Seale, to launch the Black Panther but they are not solutions Yet it’s the movement’s practical Party for Self Defense in 1966—later to our problems. That is success that puts it in a precarious shortened to the Blank Panther Party why we call them survival position today. At the time of this (BPP). programs, meaning survival writing [fall 2011], 50.2 million pending revolution. We say Americans and one-third of The party soon expanded its ambit that the survival program female-headed households are beyond police surveillance, dropping of the Black Panther Party food insecure. Food prices are “for Self Defense” from its name and, is like the survival kit of a rising, unemployment remains through dialogue with community sailor stranded on a raft. It stubbornly high, and a Republican members, setting up a range of helps him to sustain himself Congress has ambitions to amputate community service programs. By until he can get completely social programs from the body of 1968, the most successful of these was out of that situation. So the survival programs are not government in the name of fighting the Breakfast for Children Program. inflation. In the resulting vacuum, David Hilliard, the Panther’s chief answers or solutions, but community organizations have been of staff, recalls the first donation of they will help us to organize pressed, with government’s approval, food that kicked off the program, the community around a true into providing service to the poor. given by Emmett Grogan of the San analysis and understanding It is easy to see the appeal of this Francisco “Diggers”: of their situation. community development approach The Panthers’ breakfast program for the present administration: Emmett left off some bags eventually served 45 branches of food his group distributes it smacks of the self-help ethos, nationwide. New York’s chapters fed to the runaways, draft 2 involves vanishingly small resources numbers in the hundreds, California’s and can be encouraged without at resisters and freaks who in the thousands. Nonetheless, the same time having to admit the have flocked to Berkeley… the universal aspiration was for a existence of poverty. We told him to put the stuff balanced diet of fresh fruit twice a outside the office: in a few week, and always a starch of toast or To inoculate ourselves against the minutes people were flocking grits, protein of sausage, bacon, or dangers of being co-opted into the by, stocking up on onions eggs, and a beverage of milk, juice, or very food system we have spent a and potatoes. Now Emmett hot chocolate. Done without a penny decade criticizing, we need food politics. donates the food regularly. from the government or organized I don’t just mean policies mediating the Like the newspaper, the food philanthropy, the meals were the only interactions between the government serves a double purpose, source of nutrition in many a child’s and the private sector of the corporate providing sustenance but also day. food regime. I’m referring to politics functioning as an organizing as an ideology, as a positive system tool: people enter the office The breakfast program was part of of beliefs, analytical principles, and when they come by, take a suite of survival programs with values that informs practice. some leaflets, sit in on an explicit goals of transforming relations elementary PE [political around private property—the vision The Black Panthers Feed the education] class, talk to cadre, of a land bank, for instance, called World and exchange ideas. for creation of trusts that would Since WW II, African American What distinguished the Black Panther suspend the profit motive from land income has consistently stayed at Party’s food distribution was its tenure, making other arrangements around 60% of white household part in a far wider vision for social possible. Land reform was, in turn, income. The government’s persistent change. Part of the mechanisms of part of a broader political strategy, refusal to address poverty in the Black Panther Party’s self-defense enshrined in the Panthers’ Ten Point African American communities was were programs for survival, ranging Plan, which featured “power to compounded in the 1960s by an from the provision of free shoes determine the destiny of our black ongoing criminalization of poor, and education to land banking and and oppressed communities,” “full urban African Americans by local the school breakfast program. In the employment,” “an end to . .robbery Hoover was quite aware that it would could only be banished permanently be impossible to cast the party as by a far more radical transformation merely ‘a group of thugs’ so long as than the government was ready it was meeting the daily nutritional to provide. The Panthers knew requirements of an estimated 50,000 political education was vital to grade-schoolers in forty-five inner understanding the reasons behind cities across the country. Rather their hunger. than arguing that the government itself should deliver such a program, The Black Panthers’ struggles for however, he targeted the Panthers’ survival may not yet have brought efforts for destruction.” the revolution, but at least they exposed the scale of change that will Though the FBI eventually did succeed be needed to finally banish hunger in bringing down the Panthers—and in our communities. And in the US the breakfast program—the program today, families most likely to be food Bobby Seal checks food bags, 1972 has an important legacy. Not only insecure are headed by women. It’s by the capitalists,” “decent housing,” was it responsible for creating what possible to carry our survival work and “decent education,” “completely today might be called a “temporary help people understand why women free health care,” and an end to war, autonomous zone” for instigating are paid less than men, why hunger militarism, police brutality, and, in real “school meal revolutions” (as flourishes among the poor, and why the final point, “land, bread, housing, opposed to the kind shown on capitalism will not willingly provide education, clothing, justice, peace today’s TV), and for embarrassing food to those unable to afford it. and people’s community control the federal government into taking of modern technology.” It was the child nutrition seriously, but—at In providing these explanations, political vision, the possibility of a least in some cases—it involved a and organizing effective actions to different tomorrow after surviving transformation within the domain in address inequity, we will make the today, that transformed the Panthers’ which the Panthers have consistently food movement more threatening feeding into radical social work, not been considered remiss: gender. to the powerful. That sounds 3 band-aid social work. frightening, but every movement One female activist recalled the that has ever accomplished social Effect and Aftermath lengths to which the Panthers change—whether the civil rights Jesse Jackson called the breakfast earnestly, but inconsequentially, paid movement, the Indian independence program “creative and revolutionary.” lip service to questions of gender movement, or indeed the global People across the country copied equality and then said: justice movement—has put the demands of justice ahead of the it. Nationally, because the breakfast You could have a thousand program actually fed children, it stoked need to accommodate oppressive dialogues on gender issues thinking. Instead, such movements grassroots pressure that eventually led and you would have never to increased funding for kids’ food. In have been armed with radical ideas gotten that result faster than for a better future, in which all a Senate hearing George McGovern you did by saying look, if you asked the school lunch program people are possessed of dignity, and love these children, if you love able to govern themselves.

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