The Black Panthers are back, and with their reappearance has come a familiar, telling question, especially from white progressive spaces.
The resurgence of the Black Panthers has reignited not only memories of a revolutionary past and debates over how this 2026 iteration should carry out its work, but a very old, very American discomfort with the sight of armed Black people in public and a familiar, nervous question about who belongs in a Black liberation struggle that was never designed as some kind of multiracial social club.
So in other words, folks are less worried about the politics than they are about the optics, and less curious about the history than they are about where they, personally, fit inside it. Which is how we arrive, once again, at the most on-brand question from white progressive spaces: can we join the Black Panther Party for Self Defense?
M’kay, so let’s imagine it. Because we already had a dress rehearsal in the summer of 2020.
Y’all remember that?
George Floyd was murdered and suddenly every white person within a five-mile radius of a Whole Foods discovered their inner revolutionary. They were in the streets playing dead on yoga mats. They were flat on their backs, eyes closed, waiting for a drone shot so history could capture their best angle.
They held up “I Can’t Breathe” signs that were perfectly lettered and centered, and freshly laminated like oxygen deprivation was a slogan or branding opportunity instead of a death sentence.
They showed up in kente cloth fresh from Amazon Prime, still creased, still smelling like the warehouse. Kneeling. Chanting. Crying. Posting. Apologizing for “whiteness” in long captions that centered their emotional journey more than the bodies in the morgue.
White folks formed human chains around Black protesters like they were the Secret Service, and they were convinced that their presence was a magic shield against police batons, tear gas, and bullets. “They won’t hurt you if we’re here,” they whispered, as if the history of this country had not already provided a very long, very bloody rebuttal.
They painted “BLM” on boarded-up windows and then argued with Black organizers about whether looting was “productive.” They brought acoustic guitars and sage to the front lines. They brought their therapist’s language, guilt, tears, and their need to be seen as “one of the good ones.”
They held hands and sang. They asked cops to kneel with them like it was a group icebreaker at a diversity retreat. They filmed themselves confronting racists and titled the videos things like, “Uncomfortable Conversation with My Uncle at Thanksgiving.”
And every five minutes somebody was whisper-yelling, “Are we centered? Are we decentering ourselves? I just want to make sure I’m not taking up space while I stand in the very front with my ring light.”
They were making sourdough starter and anti-racist reading lists in the same afternoon, turning structural terror into a lifestyle aesthetic. They were asking for “resources,” “toolkits” and “emotional labor” like liberation came with a customer service desk. And every last one of them was convinced that standing in the street for two hours, wearing a mask that said “Ally,” had somehow placed them on the right side of history forever with no further risk or reckoning required.
So when white people now ask if they can “join” the Black Panther Party, this is the historical precedent.
So let’s picture the white Panthers showing up to a community defense meeting with reusable water bottles, oat-milk lattes and a deep concern about optics. Asking if the black beret can be “rebranded” because it feels so “aggressive.” So they suggest earth tones and breath work before discussing police violence. No wait, let’s not forget the land acknowledgment before armed patrol. They want to talk about “allyship” and “centering voices” while sitting directly in the center of the room.
They’ll want to know if the guns are symbolic. They’ll want to workshop the phrase “by any means necessary” because it feels “triggering.” They’ll want to “hold space” for the Ten-Point Program and “interrogate” the word “self-defense” and rewrite it into a Google Doc with comments turned on.
Point One: “We want freedom.”
White member: “Can we unpack what ‘freedom’ means for everyone? I just think it’s important to hold space for nuance.”
The Panthers say the police are an occupying army.
White member: “Not all cops. My cousin is a cop. He brings potato salad to family reunions.”
They propose armed community self-defense.
White member: “Violence isn’t the answer. What if we tried a healing circle? How about restorative justice circles for cops and ICE agents? Maybe the state just needs to feel heard.”
They talk about political prisoners.
White member: “Wow. This is heavy. I’m going to have to take a mental health day.”
They talk about imperialism.
White member: “I traveled once. I love other cultures.”
They talk about capitalism as organized theft.
White member: “But what about small businesses?”
They talk about white supremacy as a global system.
White member: “I don’t see color.”
By week two, they’ll absolutely form a committee. They will ask if chanting is inclusive of introverts. By week three, they’ll be demanding a code of conduct about “hostile rhetoric.” By week four, they’re calling the Panthers “divisive” for being too focused on Black people in a Black liberation organization.
And the wildest part is the moral reversal. The descendants of settlers, enslavers, and empire managers would arrive wanting to be led by Black people into their own political awakening, like oppression is a graduate seminar and Black pain is the syllabus. They wouldn’t be asking, “How do we dismantle whiteness?” They’d be asking, “Where do we fit?”
And just like in 2020, they will want credit for showing up. They will want their proximity to danger to count as danger and their discomfort to count as sacrifice. They will want their presence in Black struggle to stand in for the work they refuse to do in white spaces.
Because what 2020 revealed is not just that white people wanted to help. It’s that many of them wanted to be seen helping. They wanted a role in the drama, to be morally legible and be granted absolution by association. They wanted to kneel into history and be captured by the camera on the right side of it.
So when they ask if they can join the Panthers, what they are really asking is: Can we stand inside your fire without getting burned? Can we wear your symbols without carrying your risk? Can we be part of your resistance without becoming a problem in our own communities?
But the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was never built for that kind of participation. They were built for discipline, not performance. For strategy, not symbolism. For confrontation, not catharsis. For people who understood that revolution is not a performance, or a photo op, or seasonal awakening, and definitely not a yoga pose.
If 2020 is any indication, white folks wouldn’t be asking how to dismantle the system that made the Panthers necessary. They’d be asking where to stand, what to wear, what to post and how to make sure everyone knows they were there. And that, right there, is why the question itself already has an answer.
The real work for white people has never been to put on a black beret and strike a pose. It’s been to go back into white families, white neighborhoods, white institutions, white churches, white police departments, white unions, white voting blocs and wage war on the lie of innocence, the comfort of dominance, and the theology of entitlement.
In other words, if white people truly understood the Black Panther Party, they wouldn’t be asking how to get in the door. They’d be asking how to tear down the house that made the Panthers necessary.
The Black Panthers were never about giving white people a role. They were about survival, self-determination, and power in a society built to crush Black life. They weren’t a multiracial personality club. They were a disciplined revolutionary formation born of police terror, economic siege and historical memory.
You don’t “join” that like a spin class. You don’t just pop into a room full of people who’ve been hunted, infiltrated, imprisoned, assassinated for generations, and say, “Hi! I brought empathy and a good heart. Where do I sign up to dismantle white supremacy? Is there a Slack channel?”
Now, some folks are gonna rush into my comments feeling personally attacked. I can hear it now: this “divisive,” “unfair,” “uncharitable,” “not all of us,” “that’s not my experience,” “you’re alienating allies.” Because offense is the last refuge of a politics that doesn’t want to interrogate power, only intentions.
But let’s be clear about what this is and isn’t.
This ain’t a referendum on whether individual white people can care about Black life. And I’m not saying white people can’t fight racism. History is full of effective examples of radical white folks working for racial justice. I am simply examining a recurring political urge that some white progressive have to be cast as the natural moral center of every struggle, as the default audience and the implied co-protagonists of Black resistance, or as proof of one’s own moral arrival. I’m talking about the desire not just to oppose injustice, but to be seen opposing it in a way that feels redemptive, cinematic and low-cost.
Black liberation has never been a stage for white moral self-fashioning. It has always been about survival, discipline, risk and confronting the state. And when people show up asking first about their role, optics, comfort or emotional journey, rather than their responsibility within whiteness itself, that reveals something structural, not personal.
At the end of the day, white progressives must confront this instinct to prioritize white feelings, white visibility and white redemption over Black strategy, Black risk and Black survival. If that makes you feel indicted, then good!
Discomfort is not the same as injustice. It is sometimes the beginning of clarity.
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