I bought the book  “Black Against Empire” outside of the Brooklyn Museum from a Revolution Books table not knowing what I was getting myself into. Not only does this book chronicle the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party but it addresses the power of oppression in America.

Here are a few excerpts that stood out to me the most:

• “We gonna fight racism not with racism, but with solidarity. We not gonna fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we gonna fight it with socialism. We not gonna fight reactionary pigs…. with any reaction on our part. We gonna fight their reaction when all of us get together and have an international proletarian revolution.” – Fred Hampton
• “Every time the people disagree with the basic decisions of the power structure it sends in its arms, guns, and force to make them agree.” – Bobby Seale
• Only when challenged do authorities reveal where they are willing to compromise and what they will do to hold onto power.
• “A revolutionary program is one set forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change the existing system to a better one,” where as “a reform program is set up by the existing exploitative system as an appeasing handout, to fool the people and to keep them quiet. Examples of these programs are poverty programs, youth work programs, and things like that.” – Bobby Seale
• While white men often took liberties with black women, a black man who flirted even mildly with a white woman was considered to be making the gravest violation of white supremacy, one that was all too often punished by death. In this context, it is not surprising that many black men associated a sexual desire for white women with a desire to be recognized as human and free.
• What made the stories of Panther repression so compelling to many young blacks in Chicago was not how unusual they were but how common. The summer had been filled with violence, and many young black people had died in conflicts with the Chicago police. On October 5, police shot sixteen-year-old John Soto in the back of the head, killing him. Eyewitnesses said police, unprovoked, had fired as Soto walked away. Soto’s older brother, Michael Soto, a black community activist and a decorated army sergeant on leave from Vietnam, helped organize rallies to protest John’s killing by police. On October 10, police fatally shot Michael Soto as well, claiming they had caught him in a robbery attempt. In August, police killed nineteen-year-old Linda Anderson by firing a shotgun through her apartment door. They claimed they had been trying to protect her from rape by an acquaintance. In 1969 and 1970, Chicago killed fifty-nine blacks versus nineteen whites in a city where white outnumbered blacks by more than two to one. A black person in Chicago was six times more likely to be killed by the police than a white person.
• Fred Hampton was a revolutionary. The unusual aspect of his case was not that the state killed him—states often kill their enemies with impunity—but rather the broad mobilization in response to his assassination. If not for this support, the Chicago Panthers initially accused of starting the shoot-out and thus being responsible for Hampton’s death would likely have been convicted. The outrageous details of the killing would never have been exposed. But the Chicago Panthers were building support by addressing the needs of the many poor Chicago blacks and organizing them politically.
• Like the Panthers, they saw a need to create a revolutionary culture that would allow Puerto Ricans to liberate themselves from mental slavery and stand up to oppression. “The chains that have been taken off slaves’ bodies are put back on their minds,” explained Young Lord David Perez. “To support its economic exploitation of Puerto Rico, the United States instituted a new educational system whose purpose was to Americanize us. Specifically, that means that the school’s principal job is to exalt the culture values of the United States… What all this does is to create severe problems for our people. First it creates a colonized mentality—that means that the people have a strong feeling of inferiority, they have a strong feeling of not being as worthy as the Americans because the structure tells them that to become American is always a goal they have to attain.”
• President Houari Boumedienne denounced the idea of a colonial “civilizing mission,” which the French had promoted, and proclaimed that “culture is a weapon in our struggle for liberation.”
• To what extent federal counterintelligence measures may have contributed to the unravelling of Newton and the Oakland Party in the 1970s is difficult to determine. But the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover would have been proud of the results. Hoover had recognized by 1969 that criminalization was the best way to diminish public support for the Black Panthers and the political challenge they posed.
• “The Black Liberation Army is not an organization: it goes beyond that. It is a concept, a people’s movement, an idea. Many different people have said and done many different things in the name of the Black Liberation Army. The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country’s prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance.” – Assata Shakur
• The history of the Black Panther Party holds important implications for two more general theoretical debates. First, this history suggests a way out of dead-end debates about how the severity of repression affects social movement mobilization. One common perspective, supported by a rich scholarly literature covering various times and places, is that “repression breeds resistance”: When authorities repress insurgency, the repression encourages further resistance. But others pose the opposite argument, wth equally rich scholarly support, suggesting that repression discourages and diminishes insurgency. A classic sociological position that seeks to reconcile this apparent contradiction is that the relationship between repression and insurgency is shaped like an “inverse U’: When repression is light, people tend to cooperate with established political authorities and take less disruptive action; when repression is heavy, the costs of insurgency are too large, causing people to shy away from radical acts. But, according to this view, it is when authorities are moderately repressive—too repressive to steer dissenters toward institutional channels of political participation but not repressive enough to quell dissent—that people widely mobilize disruptive challenges to authority.
• The broader question is why no revolutionary movement of any kind exists in the United States today. To untangle this question, we need to consider what makes a movement revolutionary. Here, the writings of Italian theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci are instructive: “A theory is ‘revolutionary’ precisely to the extent that it is an element of conscious separation and distinction into two camps and is a peak inaccessible to the enemy camp.” In other words, a revolutionary theory splits the world in two. It says that the people in power and the institutions they manage are the cause of oppression and injustice. A revolutionary theory purports to explain how to overcome those inequities. It claims that oppression is inherent in the dominant social institutions. Further, it asserts that nothing can be done from within the dominant social institutions to rectify the problem—that the dominant social institutions must be overthrown. In this sense, any revolutionary theory consciously separates the world into two camps: those who seek to reproduce the existing social arrangements and those who seek to overthrow them.