The And then. Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Inwood. Another deviation

from Orthodoxy this week, three guests but in the standard two segments.

We'll hear from the historian Donna Merch, who will correct some

misinformation that's been circulating recently about the Black Panther Party, and

then sociologist Saudi a tour and journalist Robia Namud will explain what's been going on in Pakistan with a quasi-coo and a shady election.

On this last day of Black History Month, I thought it was important to correct some criticisms of the Black Panthers I've seen floating around in this month of all months.

To do that, there's no better voice than Black Historian Donna Murch.

Her most recent book, Assada taught me, State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the movement for black lives, was published

by Haymarket books in March 2022.

In October 2010, the UNC Press published Living for the City, Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther

Party in Oakland, California.

She's not completing a new book called Capitalism Plus Dope, Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs

in Los Angeles.

Donna is an associate professor of history at Rutgers.

Donna Murch.

I keep seeing that the Black Panthers are not relevant for today.

Any truth to that or is actually a lot we can learn from them.

From my point of view, I've revisited the Panthers in different times in my life.

Starting when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s I read Asada and that was my first

introduction to the party and I was so excited about it because it represented a kind

of politics that was an alternative that I didn't know about before that.

It was at a time when the Civil Rights Movement had been enshrined and even the Republican

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