“The most important thing that we can learn to do today is think for ourselves”.
Quote from “Malcolm Talks to Young People”, a speech given by Malcolm X on Dec 31st 1964 at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York to youth from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who were on a trip to New York City from McComb, Mississippi. The speech was originally published in the Young Socialist in 1965 and reprinted in The Black Panther, Black Community News Service, Vol, IV, No 24, Tuesday May 19, 1970, pages, 12-13
THE KOS
The P. Panther Project IntercommUNITY Journal of News, Stories, and Creative Expressions
In The K0S there is love, unity and revolution
COMRADES welcome. Much love and much respect to you. Welcome to The KOS. KOS stands for Knowledge Of Self. Coming out of the Covid pandemic a couple of years ago we’d had this long talk with the revolutionary and former leader of the Black Panther Party Elaine Brown. Comrade Brown talked about organizing for struggle and liberation against colonial and imperialist oppression locally and globally she talked about revolution, about revolutionary education about trauma and pain, about spirituality and about the joy and happiness that comes with struggle and fighting for freedom and liberation. We kept bringing up the 5th point in the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program, the one that talks about the importance for oppressed peoples to have a knowledge of themselves/ourselves, a knowledge that is their own/our own, a knowledge that comes from the oppressed and not the oppressor. An anticolonial, revolutionary knowledge of self (you’ll see more of this in our curriculum story). Every time those three words ‘knowledge of self’ came out of our mouths comrade Brown would gently intervene and say ‘collective‘, ‘collective self”. Even though we understood this we also understood that we were being reminded by Panther knowledge not to forget that ‘self’ (who we are) for the oppressed is always a collective self. That reminder was an expression of revolutionary love and defense of and for the collective self. We were being reminded not to fall into the colonial trap of identifying our self in individual ways, where we compete against each other, where we fight each other over the few crumbs that the oppressor throws at us. That’s what the oppressor wants us to do. We believe that to refuse to do that is the starting point for the birth of a collective revolutionary consciousness where we start to produce and give voice to our own revolutionary knowledge and our own revolutionary ways of knowing doing and being. When we talk about Knowledge of Self then we are talking about knowledge of the collective self from the standpoint of the oppressed.
The KOS is a Black Panther Party for Self-Defense inspired anticolonial and anti-imperialist intercommUNITY & intergenerational journal and publishing house for and from the People and for and from the oppressed. The word IntercommUNITY comes from two Panther concepts or thoughts or ideas. The first is ‘Intercommunalism‘, Huey’s term for how the oppressed throughout the world need to understand that their (our) struggle and fight-back against oppression is intercommunal. You defend me and I defend you. The second is, ‘unity comes out of consciousness’. This is another term from Huey that means the more revolutionary consciousness we as a oppressed Peoples get the more unified we become.
THE KOS. VOL 1, Edition 1, Friday, February 21st, 2025
The K0S is a People’s journal. It is intergenerational. It is intercommunal. It is intercommUNITY. It is a journal and magazine for the oppressed. It is a journal for comrades who reside locally in our city of Tkaronto/Toronto, it is a journal for our comrades who reside across Canada and across the North, the South and the Caribbean land and water space that is Turtle Island and it is a journal for comrades who reside across the globe internationally. It is a journal dedicated to radical, revolutionary political education, Panther style. It is a journal for collective self-defense, Panther style. Its focus is on publishing stories about radical, anticolonial and revolutionary grounded forms of collective organizings, expressions, creativity, voices, educational initiatives and interventions, news investigations and Peoples’ journalism and accounts that expose and oppose oppression, that come from the historically oppressed and from the truth of the historically oppressed as collectives: Let’s remember that the Panthers first edition of The Black Panther intercommunal newspaper featured the story for the People of the Panther’s own investigation of the murder of Denzil Dowell that countered and opposed the racist and murderous lies put out by the police. So we invite all stories of collective struggle, thought, liberation and resistant on the part of the oppressed. BUT ESPECIALLY we invite all forms of storytelling about our experiences, of our world and what we do collectively that is either grounded in or has in one way or another drawn on or has been inspired by Panther Politics, Panther knowledge, Panther thinking, Panther Pedagogy, Panther organizings, and Panther expressions and understandings about what revolutionary unifying, intercommunal collective SELF-DEFENSE is.
So with this in mind we invite all forms of storytelling expression including collage, drawings, paintings, artwork of all kinds, music, drama, dance, graphic stories, audio work, radio work, pod work, film, documentaries, poetry or just straight written (typed or hand written work) that speaks to what we the oppressed as communities and collectives do, who we are, how we think, how we understand our world how we oppose colonial and colonizing oppression, how we contest it, and how we organize our WHOLE selves to defend ourselves against it but always (always) using the ways of talking and speaking that is comfortable to us. We are not an academic journal. We are a space of knowledge expression, knowledge gathering, knowledge sharing and knowledge building for the oppressed by the oppressed so we don’t want no academic language or no academic styles, we just want the talk-talk and the word-words and the music of those word-words that are ours and that we use in our everyday communication with ourselves and for ourselves as oppressed Peoples. The KOS will publish new material every 6 months starting from Feb 21st, 2025 onwards (February 21st, 1965 being the day 60 years ago that they took Malcolm’s life but not his influence nor his legacy). In the coming editions we will publish stories that tell the stories of the work and the actions done by our own collective (the PPP) along with work submitted by individual comrades and comrade organizations and collectives as well as reprinting and reclaiming past work done by the oppressed particularly stories from the Black Panther intercommunal newsletter that we believe are necessary for us stay politically grounded in the present and for the future.
Submission details: Please send submissions for consideration or any questions you may have about format or submission guidelines by email to The Protege Panther Project for Self-Defense at, theppantherproject4selfdefense@gmail.com
The Panther Podcast
https://thepantherpodcast6.podbean.com/
The Panther Podcast in collaboration with Nelson Mandela Park Public School (Toronto District School Board) in Regent Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is a production and creation of the Protégé Panther Project for Self-Defense (PPPSD). As an extension of the revolutionary consciousness building work of the PPPSD (work that is grounded in the teaching and learning philosophies, methods and practices of the original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) the Panther Podcast (PP) works collaboratively with our younger grade 8 comrades in their development as People’s journalists, People’s researchers, People’s skolaz and People’s storytellers. This is the self-defense and defense-of-the-collective-self aim of the Panther Podcast; to produce People’s Journalists, People’s researchers, People’s skolaz, and People’s storytellers for the People. The PP is an ongoing revolutionary, liberatory, educational intercommUNITY intervention.
In a packed public school classroom filled with our students from the class itself and many others in the school, and alongside staff, teachers and families and members from the community as well as hundreds watching live online locally and internationally our grades 5 & 6 comrades co-collaborated in the organization of one of the most radical, revolutionary and profound moments in the history of public school education in Canada. In doing so they put together the kinds of questions to the legendary and iconic former leader of the Black Panther Party Elaine Brown that can only come from the clearly demonstrated emergence of a collective revolutionary consciousness and a Panther ‘pedagogy’ (what some folks call the method of teaching and learning) that instills ‘I is We’ as an act of revolutionary love and revolutionary anticolonial self-defense as love at every turn in every second of every moment.
Organization is the weapon of the oppressed
COMING SOON
Reclaiming the Sacred. Memorial for the oppressed is self-defense: It is revolutionary
COMING SOON
The KOS
Any invitation to a space of opposition, liberation and resistance has to be radical, revolutionary and honestly anticolonial and anti-imperialist otherwise how else can we as oppressed peoples know and feel that we belong there? How can we believe it will defend us?
EVERY ATOM OF POWER TO EVERY ATOM OF THE PEOPLE
theppantherproject4selfdefense@gmail.com
Copyright (C) The KOS. The Protege Panther Project for Self-Defense. All rights reserved.
The Protege Panther Project for Self-Defense 