War & Peace Quote by Bobby Seale

Seale’s line is built like a rebuttal to a temptation: the urge to answer racial violence with a mirror-image of it. Coming from a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, that’s not a bland call for harmony; it’s a strategic correction. The Panthers were routinely caricatured as separatist extremists, and Seale’s phrasing punctures that caricature while keeping the moral indictment intact. He’s drawing a bright line between righteous anger and the politics of racial essentialism.

The intent is tactical as much as ethical. “You don’t fight racism with racism” rejects the easy dopamine of revenge logic, the idea that flipping the hierarchy counts as justice. Seale is warning that adopting racism’s categories - treating people as fungible representatives of a race - concedes the enemy’s worldview. It shrinks liberation into scorekeeping.

Then he pivots: “the best way…is with solidarity.” That word is doing heavy lifting. Solidarity isn’t color-blindness, and it isn’t a plea for niceness; it’s coalition. It implies shared material interests, mutual protection, and organized power across lines that racism is designed to police. In the Panthers’ historical moment - surveillance, COINTELPRO disruption, urban disinvestment, police brutality - solidarity reads as a survival technology. It’s also a media strategy: a sentence that can travel beyond activist circles without being defanged, insisting that the target is racism as a system, not any one group as a symbol.