Transgressing to teach: Theorising race and security through struggle
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211060690 |
| Author | Chris Rossdale |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211060690
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(4) 634 –649
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211060690
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Transgressing to teach:
Theorising race and
security through struggle
Chris Rossdale
University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
Recent interventions in critical security studies have argued that the field has struggled to account
for the racialised/racist foundations of security politics. This article engages with the US Black
Panther Party (BPP), arguing that the Party did important work to show how security politics
is dependent on racial violence. The idea that we can theorise global politics through struggle
(`struggle as method’) is becoming popular within disciplinary International Relations (IR), but
has longer lineages in Black radical thought. The BPP were important advocates of struggle as
method, with tactics and strategies intentionally designed with a pedagogical purpose; through
Panther actions (including community self-defence and survival programmes), and the state’s
response to these, the mechanisms of capitalist white supremacy were laid bare. The article
therefore acknowledges BPP action as a series of theoretical interventions, which demonstrated
how the terms of US/white security are rooted in and dependent on anti-Blackness. It also shows
how Panther tactics prefigured alternative, radical, anti-statist approaches to security, these
conceptualised as `survival pending revolution’. The article closes by arguing that scholarship on
critical security studies - especially as related to the racialised politics of security - should do
more to work with and acknowledge its indebtedness to struggle as method.
Keywords
black panther party, critical security studies, race and racism, critical pedagogy, black radicalism
Received: 6th January 2021; Revised version received: 6th September 2021; Accepted: 10th September 2021
In 1969, FBI Director John Edgar Hoover claimed that the BPP was the ‘greatest threat to
the internal security’ of the United States. Under his leadership, the Bureau worked tire-
lessly to destroy the Panthers, waging a campaign of misinformation, intimidation, and
assassination. It’s easy to see why the Panthers were threatening to the US state apparatus.
Corresponding author:
Chris Rossdale, University of Bristol, 11 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TU, UK.
Email: chris.rossdale@bristol.ac.uk
1060690POL0010.1177/02633957211060690PoliticsRossdale
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics
Rossdale 635
The Party’s conception of Black America as a colonised nation under imperial occupa-
tion; their determination to arm, educate, organise, and feed the ghetto; and their anti-
capitalist internationalism, underpinned a Black radicalism that sought to overturn the
very foundations of US society.
In 1970, BPP leader Huey P. Newton was asked about his successes in communicating
the party’s ideology to the masses. ‘So far I haven’t been able to do it well enough to keep
from being booed off the stage, but we are learning’, he replied (Newton, 2019: 207).
Nevertheless, he had built a Party strategy that was explicitly designed to deepen under-
standing within Black communities about both the nature of oppression within capitalist
white supremacy and the means for overturning these conditions. Ranging from armed
patrols of the police to community breakfast programmes, Panther methods were con-
ceived as simultaneously revolutionary and pedagogical.
This article locates Newton’s pedagogical approach within a theoretical tradition
which recognises that political struggle operates as a critical method or analytic through
which to read relations of power and violence. Panther tactics, and the responses they
elicited from the authorities, were designed to make clear the true nature of US society, to
unsettle dominant categories of understanding, and to generate new concepts and social
relations. As much as they were deeply practical, directed towards addressing the mani-
fold insecurities of daily life for Black Americans, they were also intimately theoretical,
adopting, circulating, and reshaping a conceptual framework directed towards survival
and revolution. Attention to the theoretical qualities of political struggle, to ‘struggle as
method’, can be a powerful lens through which to understand both the contours of power
and the possibilities for new political formations.
I argue that BPP struggle elucidates the racist foundations through which security poli-
tics in the United States is produced, and which security politics in turn remakes. The
Party’s ascribed status as security threat came not only because they armed themselves
and prepared for revolution, but because they revealed how the fundamental terms of US
society are rooted in and dependent on Black subjugation. They demonstrated how stand-
ards of law, order, and security are predicated on (while concealing) racialised violence
and exploitation. They called attention to the social relations that are produced as normal,
safe, as the status quo which security secures and from which insecurity departs, and to
the ideological work that sustains this perception. Through their struggle, they made clear
the whiteness of US security, and the centrality of that white security to the United States
as a capitalist-imperialist project. In their efforts to practically address the violences expe-
rienced by Black Americans, the Panthers also prefigured a broadly anti-capitalist, anti-
statist response to insecurity; this they termed ‘survival pending revolution’.
Recent interventions in Critical Security Studies have recognised that the field has
struggled to contend with the racialised foundations of security politics, indeed that it has
reproduced racist categories of the human and endangerment (Eriksson Baaz and
Verweijen, 2018; Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019, 2020; Security Dialogue, 2020).
In the context of these debates, the article situates the BPP as important theorists of the
racialised politics of security. It also demonstrates the importance of recognising struggle
as method. The idea that we can theorise IR through engagements with struggle is becom-
ing popular, but this emergence obscures the fact that struggle as method has long been
foundational to critical thought – a legacy often concealed through translation into aca-
demic contexts. While explicit engagements within IR have tended to begin from the
work of Michel Foucault, I argue that the role of Black radicalism must be foregrounded
in such work.
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