Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life by Diane C Fujino (review)

The subtitle of Diane C. Fujino’s biography of Richard Aoki—on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life—certainly rings true given recent allegations that the former Black Panther Party (BPP) member, Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) leader, dedicated educator and mentor in East Bay community colleges, and radical activist for class and racial inclusion was a long-time FBI informant. Would it not be paradoxical if someone so heavily immersed in a struggle against a flawed and racist system had indeed served that very system? Such was the contention made in journalist Seth Rosenfeld’s recent book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (2012).

The publication of Fujino’s biography of Aoki preceded Rosenfeld’s text; she also accessed FBI documents as part of her exhaustive research and yet does not broach the possibility of her subject being an informant, likely because the incriminating documents were not yet publicly available. The bulk of evidence showcasing his commitment to various causes at the nexus of socialist politics, Third Worldism, and Black radicalism is so great that the very suggestion of his snitching appears ludicrous. As the current head of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Fujino outlined her assessment of the “weak” case against Aoki in an article for the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Where’s the evidence Aoki was FBI informant?” (August 22, 2012). Much discussion and debate have ensued, conferring extra gravity to texts such as Samurai Among Panthers, a major guidebook in the evolving maze of identity negotiation for the civil rights pioneer who committed suicide—amidst illness—in 2009.

Aoki, a Japanese American born in 1938 in California, cultivated a strategic reputation as a tough fighter and community-minded individual. He was diminutive in stature but scrappy, versatile, and handy with weapons. Corralled into a dusty and suffocating internment camp by the US government during WWII, he was home-schooled by his rakish father, lived only briefly with his emotionally distant mother, flirted with gang life, built friendships and street credibility among the primarily Black residents of his West Oakland “hood,” and found himself attracted to the potential stability offered by the military. Perhaps these were some of the alternative “families” that the activist amassed over the course of what he calls “Richard’s happy childhood, which Richard doesn’t even remember” (5). Aoki eventually earned degrees from Merritt College (the hotbed of Black nationalism and founding site of the Panthers under Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale) and the University of California, Berkeley, location of the 1969 student strikes that led to revolutionary curriculum changes. The rise of ethnic studies had begun, and Aoki—primarily affiliated at that time with the Asian American Movement (AAM)—was instrumental in that effort as both leader and participant.

Judging Fujino’s text for its own merits as a scholarly biography requires some degree of critical distancing from the aforementioned controversy. What Samurai Among Panthers definitely accomplishes is to set forth a detailed double-voiced narrative, a richly harmonious duet between the activist’s own voice and his biographer’s reflective commentary, usually in the form of a short essay at the end of each chapter. Two font styles easily differentiate the speakers, allowing for a kind of paratactic effect where Fujino synthesizes observations made by Aoki without diluting or overtaking his discursive momentum. Formally, what disrupts the flow of the text somewhat is the placement of bibliographical information in a large terminal section of the book; reading with the full complement of endnotes and sources involves a constant flipping back and forth which proves a bit unwieldy. While this inconvenience may be a result of the publisher’s rather than the author’s choices, the text would have been more readable had there been footnotes at the bottom of each page or following each of the eleven chapters and epilogue. Regardless...