African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives

2. From Panther to Monster: Representations of Resistance from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s to the Boyz in the Hood and Beyond

37 2 From Panther to Monster: Representations of Resistance from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s to the Boyz in the Hood and Beyond Kalí Tal SEVERAL YEARS AGO, WHILE BROWSING THE “AFRICAN AMERICAN” section of a local bookstore, I picked up Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (1994), by Sanyika Shakur, also known as Monster Kody Scott. I had been rereading Blood in My Eye, the last work of incarcerated Black Panther Party associate George Jackson, and a blurb on the back cover of Monster caught my eye. A reviewer claimed that, like George Jackson, Sanyika Shakur had made a “complete political and personal transformation . . . from Monster to Sanyika Shakur, Black nationalist, member of the New Afrikan Independence Movement and crusader against the causes of gangsterism.” When I began to read the book, I had no idea that it was going to relate to my decade-long study of the narratives and myths of the Vietnam War or that my reading would result in a new understanding of the power and attractiveness of Vietnam War imagery to Black youth. This imagery, as my readings reveal, serves as a bridge between the consciously ideological and radical formulations of the Black Panther Party and the politically incoherent and image-obsessed world of mainstream contemporary Black youth culture. In this essay, I examine the revision of the image of the Black Panther, refracted through the lens of the popular history of the Vietnam War. The erasure of explicit political ideology in much of mainstream contemporary Black popular culture is intimately connected to the way in which 38 Kalí Tal mythic narratives and iconography of the Vietnam War have replaced the critical economic and social analysis so prevalent in the 1960s. The rehabilitation of the image of the (White) Vietnam veteran was begun with the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington , D.C., in 1982, and completely affected by the renewal of American “pride” and U.S. imperialism via the celebration and patriotic rhetoric surrounding the Gulf War.1 In Black popular culture, the consciously political, often explicitly Marxist, rhetoric of the Black Panthers and other Black liberation workers has been worn away until almost all that is left is the image of the black clad, leather-jacketed, beret-wearing Black man with a gun, bereft of political or ideological coherence. Monster is the text in my hand, but as I hope to illustrate, it is representative of a much larger trend. In 1960, George Jackson was convicted of stealing seventy dollars from a gas station and given a sentence of one year to life. In prison, he “met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao” and began to study economics and military history. It became Jackson’s goal “to transform the Black criminal mentality into a Black revolutionary mentality” (G. Jackson , 1994, p. iii). Jackson didn’t start off as a political prisoner, but he slowly became one as he was radicalized first by his reading and then through his growing connections to revolutionary organizations outside the prison walls and his own attempts to organize inside prison. Jackson was shot and killed by guards inside San Quentin on August 21, 1971, during an alleged escape attempt. He had several times voiced the conviction that there was a conspiracy against his life. The literature of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was self-consciously ideological. As Gwendolyn D. Pough describes in her essay “Rhetoric that Should Have Moved the People: Rethinking the Black Panther Party” in this volume, much Panther rhetoric was so explicitly Marxist that at times its dogmatism and employment of jargon alienated rather than attracted the Black public. As Pough points out, though, the Panthers’ message and self-presentation was effective enough to draw a large number of African Americans to their cause, to strike sympathetic chords in White radicals, and to frighten the White establishment severely enough that the Panthers were awarded the title of “Public Enemy Number One” on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous Most Wanted list. Blood in My Eye begins with Jackson’s description of the path of Black radicalism, from “the confused flight to national revolutionary Africa, through the riot stage of revolutionary Black Amerika.” Jackson wrote, From Panther to Monster 39 “We have finally arrived at scientific revolutionary socialism with the rest of the colonial world.” And he comments—with relief...