[O]ne of the cornerstones of Whiteness, one of its defining characteristics, is the entitlement to be as you are, as you wish to be, in public spaces. People of color are not shocked to learn, in the time of Covid-19, that they must comply with someone else’s rules — rules that might seem arbitrary or unimportant to them personally — in order to be allowed to participate in public spaces, in community life. That is a normal condition of life for people of color and especially Black people. In fact, the enforcement of those behaviors — behaviors unrelated to public health — is one of the most important weapons of oppression.

White people have been cooped up, deprived of our usual stuff, and now that we’re “opening up” again, many are craving that sense of belonging — being of a shared space, but also possessing it. We are enjoying, once again, a command of spaces where we can consume what we want, where we can be served. I feel that craving myself — I would love nothing more right now than to stroll the aisles of Target, unmasked, sipping an iced latte from Starbucks as I buy some stuff I don’t need. Or maybe to go shoe shopping and have someone bring me pretty things and help me put them on my feet. We all want so desperately for things to be normal, and when I cheerfully offer a mask, I’m the reminder that they aren’t—and the reminder that their breath, their body, is no longer unconditionally welcome everywhere. They no longer own the space. In fact, they never did own it, but in the past, retail workers have been dedicated to making them feel like they did.

This original tweet thread (attached) is great, but I'm sharing specifically because of this excellent commentary by a former college classmate:

I saw this twitter thread posted by a friend today. This is a somewhat misleading account of both Hampton and the Black Panthers that omits an essential point: the Black Panthers were a Maoist organization and Fred Hampton was a Marxist-Leninist. It's such a central part of both entity's existence that it's literally in both of their first sentence descriptions on their Wikipedia page, and yet Harriot takes pains not to mention it. He spends probably 300-500 words describing the life and activism of Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, and Fred Hampton without mentioning all of their commitment to revolutionary socialism. To continue Harriot's rhetorical device, that Hampton and the Black Panthers were communists was the *real* reason they were considered so dangerous by the American national security apparatus at the time.

I mention it because it's incredibly important to understand that both the Black Panthers and, arguably more importantly, Fred Hampton, were successful community organizers *because* of their revolutionary socialism and how that informed their work. They came closer to building a multi-racial working-class movement than anyone had in American history at that time and arguably closer than anyone has since. This is precisely *because* of their core critique of capitalism, and their call for its dismantling, not in spite of it. This critique of capitalism united workers of very different racial and cultural backgrounds in a common cause against their true adversary. This was, and is, incredibly dangerous to the existence and continued prospering of their adversary--the American capitalist class.

In State and Revolution (a required reading for all Black Panthers), Lenin says in the opening paragraph:

"During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it."

In talking about Fred Hampton--somebody Harriot rightly admires--while omitting the reality of his ideology, Harriot is making Hampton a harmless, whitewashed civil rights icons in the way that many before him were. There is no path to the end of racism without the end of capitalism. That isn't just my opinion--it's the opinion of essentially all your favorite canonical black civil rights leaders:

MLK ("America must move toward a democratic socialism.”), Malcolm X (“You can’t have capitalism without racism”) WEB Dubois (member of the SPA), Stokely Carmichael (advocated for pan-African socialism) Angela Davis (just, her whole career), Ella Baker (founded a socialist org), Bayard Rustin, the Combahee River Collective (socialists and some of the original intellectuals of black queer feminist theory), the aforementioned Hampton, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and the rest of the Black Panthers—the list goes on. Even Ibram Kendi, a recent darling of anti-racist reading lists, says in “How to be an Antiracist” that systemic racism will not end without the end of capitalism.

Based on his previous writing, it’s reasonable to assume that Harriot omits this truth because Hampton’s revolutionary socialism is not convenient to the political points Harriot would like to make. Harriot is of the liberal opinion that racism can be effectively excised from the bloated corpse of capitalism, and in so doing would revive and rejuvenate said corpse. This is a fairly established opinion for a wide swathe of the American intellectual arena, but it is not one shared by the most effective and revered leaders of the civil rights era. So while highlighting Hampton’s story is important, it is also important to note that he did not agree with people like Harriot. I expect Fred Hampton would not have appreciated his ideological underpinnings being intentionally omitted in order to make his story more palatable to those who seek to abolish racism while propping up capitalism, something he would have considered an impossible aim.

With all of that being said, Hampton and the Black Panther's stories are incredibly important stories to know in order to understand how far the white supremacist/capitalist/colonialist state will go in order to maintain and protect itself.