Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
This paper unearths the relation between French philosopher Michel Foucault and the US
Black Panther Party (BPP). I argue that Foucaults shift from archaeological inquiry to
genealogical critique is fundamentally motivated by his encounter with American-style
racism and class struggle, and by his engagement with the political philosophies and documented struggles of the BPP. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, I assess Foucaults biographies and interviews from the transitional period of 197072 that indicate the fact and
nature of this formative encounter. Second, I turn to some of the writings of BPP leaders and
to the theme of politics and war as they articulated it. Third, I address this same theme of
politics as war as it gets taken up and rearticulated by Foucault between 1971 and 1976, with
an eye to the degree to which the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers silently,
yet profoundly, inform Foucaults genealogical work. I conclude by raising some ethical and
political questions pertaining to the criteria of truthful speech in scholarly discourse.
314
316
318
320
322
324
326
328
Figure 3 BPP Berkeley, organized petition for community control of police, summer 1970 (Billy X Jennings,
www.itsabouttimebpp.com).
political prisoners program, was the criminalization of the BPPs revolutionary survival
programs along with the self-defense methods
resorted to in order to protect them. Government programs such as the FBIs Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were
established for the express purpose of criminalizing, discrediting and neutralizing black
liberation movements. As explicitly outlined
by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a 1968
memorandum to FBI Field Offices: The
purpose of [COINTELPRO] is to expose,
disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise
neutralize the activities of black nationalist,
hate-type organizations and groupings, their
leadership, spokesmen, membership, and
supporters, and to counter their propensity
for violence and civil disorder.59
A brief example drawn from the autobiography of the late (and dearly missed) Safiya
Bukhari-Alston throws this governing
tendency into relief. Bukhari-Alston was a
member of the Black Panther Party and a
lifetime social justice activist. In Coming of
Age: A Black Revolutionary, she describes
the event that awakened her to political
consciousness and prompted her to join the
BPP, an organization with whose revolutionary politics she previously disagreed. Sent by
her college sorority to help disadvantaged
children in Harlem as part of a service
project, she decided to volunteer for one of
many of the Black Panther community
service enterprises: the Free Breakfast
Program for Children.
I couldnt get into the politics of the Black
Panther Party, but I could volunteer to feed
some hungry children; you see, children
deserve a good start and you have to feed
them for them to live to learn. Its hard to
think of reading and arithmetic when your
stomachs growling.
Every morning, at 5:00 my daughter and I
would get ready and go to the Center where I
was working on the Breakfast Program
cook and serve breakfast, sometimes talk to
children about problems they were
encountering and sometimes help them with
330
Figure 4 Cover page of The Black Panther newspaper announcing the establishment of the San Quentin
Branch of the Black Panther Party, co-founded by
George Jackson (The Black Panther, 27 February 1971).
332
Figure 4 San Quentin Branch of the BPP opens, February 1971 (The Black Panther, 27 February 1971).
Angela Y. Davis, listening to radio broadcastings about the events surrounding the
murder from her cell in Marin County Jail,
commented on the incredulity of the prison
administrations account.
I listened to the radio talk shows. The
majority of the people who called in to the
shows suspected that something was very
wrong inside San Quentin; that whatever was
askew was not the fault of the prisoners, but
of the prison hierarchy. The most consistent
aspect of these responses was the belief that
the prison administration had taken them for
fools. Over and over again, people
commented on the contempt the
administration had shown by not even
constructing a sensible story. Who on earth
would believe that the tale [the
administration told] justified all the violence
unleashed on the prisoners?71
Figure 5 September 1971: Attica prisoners negotiating with New York State officials after taking control of
the prison facility (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File
Collection and www.talkinghistory.org).
334
Figures 6 & 7 September 1971: New York State Troopers in Attica prison yard following the violent seizure of the
prison by some 600 State Troopers and National Guards. Armed with high-powered rifles and shotguns, agents of the
State fired some 4,500 rounds of ammunition on the prisoners and hostages, shooting 150 people, killing twenty-nine
prisoners, and ten hostages. (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File Collection and www.talkinghistory.org)
336
construction-into-an-abyss (une
construction en abme) of genealogical
analysis. [] We should perhaps focus our
attention less on the objects analyzed [in the
1976 Lectures] than on the apparatus of
analysis itself. [] [T]he vocabulary used to
describe the genealogical pursuit itself shares
many features in common with the
vocabulary that is used to describe the
analyses that are produced by the discourse
of war.83
concepts of sex and the so-called deployment of sexuality.84 The meaning of this
erasure, as well as the genealogy thereby
effaced, must be interrogated.
With our attention now attuned to the
self-reflexive subtext at work in the 1976
Lectures, let us begin this interrogation by
looking at what Foucault called the discourse
of race struggle. This will permit me to clarify the argument I am putting forth regarding
the subjugated genealogy of Foucaults genealogical work. It will also permit us to assess
the filiations that exist between (a) the
discourse of race struggle as Foucault
construes it, (b) Foucaults genealogical
discourse at large, and (c) the American
discourses of black liberation with which
Foucault was concurrently familiar.
The historiographical merits of Foucaults
account in the 1976 Lectures are debatable at
best, especially considering both the paucity
and the regional and ethnic homogeneity of
his sources.85 My present objective is not to
evaluate the historiographical merits of his
account, in large part because, as with many
of his genealogical works, I would argue that
the 1976 Lectures are first and foremost an
attempt to grapple with problems of power
relations in the present rather than in the
past.86 My objective is to uncover the hidden
genealogy of Foucaults account of the
discourse of race strugglea genealogy that
must be traced to 20th-century race struggles
in the USA. In other words, I seek to expose
the actual historico-political intensities and
creations that motivated Foucaults project
and to which his own work bars access.
For the purposes of this inquiry, it is thus
sufficient to point out that the genealogy
Foucault provides for the discourse of race
struggle is exclusively Europeanone which
he traces back to 17th-century England, and
follows through the France of Louis XIV to
its articulations in Nazi Germany and
Stalins Soviet Union. One of the most
important formal features of Foucaults argument is that the discourse of race struggle
begins as a revolutionary form of discourse, a
discourse that was essentially an instrument
338
340
342
344
constitutes
ones
epistemic
second
nature.114
Our normal unreflective reception of
what people tell us, Fricker argues, is
conditioned by a great range of collateral
experience. Just as our actions toward others
are in many ways learned and internalized
through social processes of normalization,
our responses to the testimony of others are
learned and internalized through processes of
epistemic socializationa social training of
the interpretative and affective attitudes in
play when we are told things by other
people.115 Importantly, this sensibility is not
immutable, it is not a dead-weight social
conditioning, but rather is characterized by
an essential adaptabilityhence, its claim to
be a capacity of reason.116 Ones testimonial
sensibility is thus an habitual (i.e. adaptable)
structure of response that shapes what sorts
of people one takes to be trustworthy in
what sorts of circumstances. Epistemic injustice occurs when a speaker receives the
wrong degree of credibility from his hearer
owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearers part, for example, when
a person or group of people are ritually
excluded from participating in truth-bearing
discourse.117
Although not an instance of the verbal
testimonial sort of epistemic injustice that
Fricker treats, the erasure of and silence
about the link between Foucault and the
Black Panthers, I argue, is a form of
epistemic injustice. Given Foucaults
suppression of the link between his thought
and that of the Black Panthers, given the
painstaking ethnocentrism with which he
casts the genealogy of the discourse of race
struggle in an exclusively European frame,
and given his silence about the State racism
of his time, I argue that Foucault is culpable of epistemic injustice. The philosopher
who claimed to desubjugate local, disqualified, marginalized or non-legitimized
knowledges through the practice of genealogy now appears, vis--vis the Black
Panthers, not only to have himself subjugated just such a body of knowledges, but
346
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
Figure 9
Information sheet from the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights.
348
Notes
1
10
11
12
13
14
15
350
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
27
28
29
30
31
32
43
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
44
352
45
47
48
49
50
46
51
52
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
64
65
66
67
68
69
defcon1/davisinterview.html, consulted 7
October 2006. See also Angela Y. Davis,
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons,
and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press,
2005).
Interview with George Jackson 3-29-71, The
Black Panther, 3 April 1971, p. 6.
A separate work would be required to assess
the points of disagreement that exist between the
works of Davis and Jackson during this period.
Divergences between their respective political
analyses, as well as their respective strategic
assessments of effective political action at the
time, are quite evident. This is partly evidenced
by the somewhat removed stance Davis
maintained in relation to the internal leadership
of the BPP (cf. note 11). By no means does the
present work intend to represent Davis and
Jackson as homophonous figures; for they are
not. However, there are salient points of
continuity between their respective analyses of
the prison, as being both a repressive and
ideological State apparatus, and of prisoners, as
being political agents in more global struggles.
These dimensions of their thought continue to
influence prison abolitionism in the present day;
they also greatly informed the French prison
abolition movement of the 1970s, and
Foucaults political philosophy of the same
period.
Le Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons:
Archives dune lutte, 19701972, eds Philippe
Artires et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), pp. 9293.
This and all subsequent translations of this work
are my own.
Discipline and Punish (1975), the 1976 Lectures
and the first volume of The History of Sexuality
(1976).
The Freedom Archives has produced an extremely
informative documentary audio CD on the Attica
rebellion and the assassination of George
Jackson, entitled Prisons on Fire: George Jackson,
Attica & Black Liberation, available at
www.freedomarchives.org. For more information
on the Attica rebellion, see the Attica Revisited
web resources at www.talkinghistory.org/attica.
A copy of The Attica Liberation Faction
Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression
Platform, drafted by the resisting prisoners, can
also be found online at The Harriet Tubman
Literary Circle website: http://www.brown.edu/
Departments/African_American_Studies/JJames/
incarceration/attica_manifesto.pdf (accessed 27
January 2007).
For secondary (and sometimes contradictory)
sources on George Jacksons life and the
circumstances of his assassination, see Churchill
and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, op. cit.;
354
70
71
72
73
74
70
71
72
73
74
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
88
89
90
91
92
86
93
94
95
97
356
98
100
101
102
103
104
105
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
106
107
108
109
110