In lieu of watching the terrible biopic on the factors that led to the death of Fred Hampton (isn’t it ludicrous that there is another film about black death and the FBI?) I urge people to actually read the words of former Black Panthers. It makes zero sense to present a film on the BPP without laying out the contradictions and limits of the party, including Marxism-Leninism, the telos of revolution, the party form, authoritarianism, leadership, patriarchy and misogyny in mass movements, cult methodologies and protection of abusers while purging people who call attention to the shitshow, the alienation of unity between blacks and other groups (none of those groups presented in the film did shit on the basis of solidarity as the BPP got destroyed).
All of these things, the film does not go into, because it is a film interested in recuperation. It is a film inundated with half-truths and revolution on the level of representation. We are presented with the interiority of the snitch, but never the interiority of Hampton, because of course we could never know what is going on inside the mind of Jesus, except when he is angry or impassioned. Black revolutionaries of course only thought of revolution and nothing else, had no personality beside their public image of revolution. If it was a film truly honoring the legacy of Hampton, it would have focused more on the collective efforts of the people, of black people who came together time and again to resist the machinations of (to use their language) fascism and Amerikan empire.
I suggest reading the black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, a former member of the BPP break down some of these limits here: