Elaine Brown, the first woman to head the Black Panther Party, said she is irritated by “New Age Racism,” which is the ideology that people can define their own destiny because everyone in America has equal rights.
More than 200 people packed into the Ohio Union Conference Theatre Wednesday evening to hear Brown’s discussion on “New Age Racism.”
“Don’t ask me about affirmative action,” said Brown, author of “A Taste of Power.” “Not when it took me 100 years to be able to use a public restroom.”
Blacks in this country have been enslaved for more than 200 years and can not even get a little piece of paper on a wall with a formal apology from America for the crime of slavery, she said.
“Blacks were promised 40 acres of land and two mules,” Brown said as she received interrupting applause from the audience. “I hope we are not still holding our breath.”
Black history is unique and must be discussed, she said.
“From 1865 forward, blacks tried to figure out where we were going to go,” Brown said. “The holocaustal crime of slavery must be revisited if we are to understand where we are going to go in this country.”
The Black Panther Party was formed to go beyond the scope of civil rights to focus on human rights, she said.
“Our party was not in existence to overthrow the government, we organized people,” Brown said. “We organized people around the ideology that this country needed to give lip service to what it said so long ago that all people are ‘created equal’.”
Brown said, slavery still exists today, but it simply has taken on a new form.
“[Regarding the Rodney King beating as well as other incidents of police brutality], racism is so inculcated into our society that you actually see a black brother resisting arrest instead of 27 white men beating a brother half to death,” She said.
Brown also cited that blacks, in this country, have the lowest education rate and 49 percent of those in prison are black.
“When you talk about (these statistics), you can either say, ‘What’s wrong with black people,’ or ‘What’s wrong with America,'” she said. “To me it’s pretty obvious there is nothing wrong with black people.”
Blacks and women have been oppressed too long, Brown said.
“One reason why blacks and women are connected is because we are all poor in a way of speaking,” she said.
With the welfare reform and mandatory sentencing, women and blacks are still not enjoying freedom, she said.
“I don’t care about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, let’s talk about who he really screwed… the poor women,” Brown said.
As far as living conditions, blacks are in a worse situation than in 1966, she said.
“I think black people ought to be in a rage about prison conditions today,” she said. “We are dying and prison is just one more way for us to go away.”
Following the program, Brown signed copies of her book. She is currently working on another book, “New Age Racism and the Condemnation of Little B”.
