War & Peace Quote by Huey Newton

Newton’s line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that America’s ugliest problems can be separated into tidy lanes. By pairing capitalism and racism as “two evils,” he’s not offering a grab-bag of grievances; he’s arguing they’re structurally entangled, mutually reinforcing systems. The phrasing is blunt on purpose: “fight” suggests ongoing combat, while “destroy” rejects the liberal promise that a few reforms, a few laws, a few symbolic victories will do. It’s a demand for abolition, not adjustment.

The subtext is strategic as much as moral. Newton is speaking from the Black Panther Party’s worldview in the late 1960s and 1970s: police violence, segregated housing, underfunded schools, and chronic unemployment weren’t random injustices but predictable outcomes of an economy that extracts value and a racial order that decides whose lives are extractable. “Racism” becomes the justification and the glue; “capitalism” becomes the machine that makes exploitation profitable and permanent. The sentence quietly rebukes civil rights narratives that treat racial equality as achievable without challenging who owns what, who controls labor, and who benefits from scarcity.

Context matters: Newton is addressing a moment when Black liberation politics collided with Cold War anti-communism, and when “law and order” rhetoric was being weaponized to criminalize Black dissent. The quote is designed to polarize and clarify. It dares listeners to choose sides: if you condemn racism but defend the economic structure that feeds it, Newton implies, you’re not fighting the evil you think you are.