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The Polynesian Panthers and The Black Power Gang in Aotearoa New Zealand: Criminal Justice versus Social Justice
| Articulations of Black Power in Aotearoa New Zealand are instructive, not just on their own merit, but also with regards to how they might enrich understandings of the relationship between Black Power and settler colonialism more broadly. With this aim, I examine the Polynesian Panther Party and The Black Power gang and how both have developed and pursued survival strategies against racism and colonialism. The paper sketches out the immediate context in which Black Power emerged in late 1960s Aotearoa New Zealand as an ideological challenge to the white supremacism evident in the assimilationist policies that accompanied urbanization. I then turn to the Polynesian Panthers and explore their application of the survival programme and the Pasifika innovations in both the Panther survival strategy and the associated concept of “revolutionary intercommunalism”. Then I turn to The Black Power gang and argue that the gang’s strategy for family survival as an answer to colonial dispossession is crucial for better understanding the relationship between Black Power (as a broad movement and ideology) and indigenous self-determination.
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