I appreciate the spirit of Jim Vernon’s response to my work, “The Panthers Can Save Us Now,” even where I do not agree with his interpretation or conclusions.¹ It would be a sad world indeed if we all held the same views. Moreover, the kind of debate he’s encouraging is necessary in these times of academic silos, toxic social media, broad anti-intellectualism, and creeping fascism in American life. I welcome this chance to exchange ideas. That said, for all he has written, Vernon manages to miss the core point of my 2017 Catalyst essay “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” which was a plea for conjunctural analysis to understand what is historically unique about the terrain we face right now rather than seeking solace in movement nostalgia.² Likewise, that essay reasserted the necessity of a broad, popular, and anti-capitalist left amid growing protests against police violence that emphasized the primacy of racial oppression in ways that obscured the class character of carceral power. There are three basic disagreements worth addressing here: Vernon’s claim that I have ignored the radical, if not revolutionary, value of the Black Panthers historically; his assertion that I have willfully minimized the Panthers’ criticisms of black cultural nationalism so that my claims might appear original; and finally, Vernon’s belief that the Panthers provide a model of revolutionary left politics that should be emulated in our own times.

It is necessary to respond to Vernon here, not just to defend my work against mischaracterization but, more importantly, to refute the notion of black vanguardism that suffuses his response and so much contemporary left politics within and beyond academe. The gathering strength of black vanguardist notions among both the newly woke and the graying New Left was precisely why I wrote that 2017 essay in the first place. My intended audience was not merely the activists and citizens who were rehearsing Black Power platitudes, aesthetics, and styles of engagement after the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin, but also those white leftists waiting for the black vanguard to appear around every historical corner. Their hope always seems to be the same: that black protests and urban rebellion will be the spark that starts a prairie fire, burning all illusions and clearing the ground for the kind of revolutionary transformation they desire. As we witnessed during the 1992 Rodney King rebellion and even more dramatically during the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, however, once the protests dissipate, technocratic reforms and corporate patronage have been the dominant responses, not some revitalized and powerful left opposition.

In the years since that initial Catalyst essay, we have witnessed all the nostalgia and wish fulfillment I and others cautioned against.³ Black Lives Matter achieved majority support throughout the country, only to disappear by late summer. Public support for either defunding or dismantling police departments, a crucial demand of the most radical, abolitionist elements of Black Lives Matter, proved elusive at best and nonexistent in many parts of the country.⁴ And far from serving as some genuinely oppositional force, militant anti-racism was “all the rage” in 2020, as most major US-based corporations stepped forward to make massive donations to anti-racist activist organizations, launch internal hiring and training initiatives among their workforces, or roll out massive ad campaigns that denounced racism and prejudice as antithetical to their firms’ core values. The Panthers did not return as Vernon might hope, but their imagery was readily evoked and, in some moments, too easily degraded, from the anachronistic, unhelpful revival of the colonial analogy and megastar Beyoncé’s spectacular Panther cosplay during the Super Bowl 50 halftime show to the gun fetishism and performative militancy of black militia like the Not Fucking Around Coalition and the New Black Panther Party, among others. The latter are philistines pushing fundamentally reactionary responses to the central problem of carceral regulation of the most submerged segments of the working class, the central problem that Black Lives Matter activism has helped to publicize. Where Beyoncé is pro-corporate and philanthropical, the parades of black militia, the usual self-help fare, and online banter about taking up arms in the mode advocated by rapper Killer Mike are all escapist, distracting, and dangerous, and far removed from the difficult choices and political positions most blacks face in their day-to-day lives.