Black Panther Aaron Dixon interview

counterpunch:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/19/living-the-panther-dream-an-interview-with-black-panther-party-veteran-member-aaron-dixon/
June 19, 2020
Living the Panther Dream – An Interview with Black Panther Party Veteran Member Aaron Dixon
by Yoav Litvin
“….In the following interview, the first in a series with BPP veteran members, I speak with author and activist Aaron Dixon, co-founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. Dixon discusses the Panthers, his experiences in Seattle, and hopes and fears for the current uprisings….
….
……….YL: How do we avoid the cooptation of this movement by liberal politicians who will ultimately sell us out?

Dixon: We have to be vigilant and aware of these things. The people are going to have to be constant in their protest and in their criticisms. We can’t allow for appeasement.

I don’t think the young people are going to allow this movement to become co-opted and neutralized. We can’t allow the liberal class to try to hijack this movement, and so we are going to have to commit ourselves until we get the kind of radical change we want and need, a real revolution.

YL: Do you see the elections moving forward in November? What’s going to happen?

Dixon: It is hard to tell. Trump sounds like a fascist dictator and has implied many times he is not willingly going to leave office. I don’t know how anyone can conceive of Biden as a savior. He has supported racist policy in the past and is a product and servant of this capitalist system. It really doesn’t matter who gets into office it’s all going to come down to the response of the people.

We missed out when we didn’t hold Obama’s feet to the fire. People thought that everything was going to be great. Obama really let the people of the world down. He expanded militarization, he gave money to the banks, he continued business as usual with the super predatory capitalist system.

We can’t go back to the way things were before COVID-19 and the murder of brother George Floyd. As we are witnessing on the streets every day, the initial rage has morphed into love and that’s exactly what happened in the BPP. We joined the BPP because of our rage, and it naturally turned into love for our comrades, for our people and for the world. Love is the guiding force. We’ve seen a lot of that. The media characterize the uprisings as “riots”, which have turned “violent”. Yet the true violence has targeted Black and Brown people within and outside of the US for 400 years.

YL: What is your opinion of the media narrative with respect to “looting” during the protests?

Dixon: Back in the day what today people refer to as “looting”, we called “liberating”; freeing things we need for our survival from the oppressor. This land is ravaged by poverty; people are truly poor, without food, healthcare or clothes.

Rage leads to damage. Rage is a reaction to systemic violence and everything representative of the establishment becomes a target, whether it is a Nordstrom’s, Macys, or other symbols of white supremacist capitalism. We saw that in the 60s when we had riots for three summers in a row; looting was always a feature.

The corporate media want to frame property damage as violence. Violence is what happened to George Floyd, to Trayvon Martin, to Breonna Taylor and so many others. State violence is what we see every day happening to Black, Latino, Native, and poor people of every color, shape, orientation, what have you.

If the media are truly concerned about the so called “violence” in the demonstrations, end the violence and the police brutality against us. Only then can we sit down and talk about property damage. Our goal is to attain equal distribution of wealth. Inequality is the primary problem in this country and state-sanctioned violence is perpetuated against all those who stand in the way.
…see link…”