Democracy in America: Bobby Seale
This is a short well worth watching conversation with Bobby Seale, one of the original organizers of the Black Panthers. The Panthers rose out of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s. What’s most interesting about Seale is how much in the American democratic tradition his politics are. The idea of America has always been a radical political concept and remains so every time it’s reintroduced.
Seale talks about organizing, which is lost to today’s advertising and marketing, election dominated, faux-consumer choice money politics. He stresses organizing is always around “community”, which in the 21st century is a nebulous term. At one point, and as Seale uses it here, community had geographical implications. Webster defines community “a: the people with common interests living in a particular area broadly : the area itself.”
In everyway, technology rolled over this definition. The whole world became capable of defining locality, at times instantaneously, transcending geographical constraints, making common interests more difficult to define, more difficult to obtain.
Seale’s democratic thinking and actions are an anachronism today, though by no means archaic. He makes the great point how American politics was negatively influenced by European thought of the last century and half, a point I’ve only previously seen made by the great democratic thinker Hannah Arendt.
Funny thing about the Panthers, they became immediate enemies of the state with their gun advocacy, a gun position as American as apple pie. It’s unfortunate it brought down their much more radical understandings of democracy, a juxtaposition a lot of Americans should give thought to today, that is if America understood anything about democracy.