Tiana Reid on Kyera Singleton and Dale Rascoe
“A taste for these ragged tatters of words and actions will always shape the way you write about them.“
— Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, translated by Thomas Scott-Railton
When we remember our Black revolutionary past, we tend to romanticize resistance, especially those of us who weren’t around at the time. Too often we think they had it all figured out; if only we could replicate their political will. Memory always leaves things out.
In the spring of 2026, former Black Panther Party member Dale Rascoe had a two-hour conversation with Kyera Singleton, Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, that demystifies some of the romanticization surrounding the Panthers and their iconography. Rascoe, who was a rank-and-file Panther, is an engaging, matter-of-fact speaker who does not mince words about her singular experience in the Party. While listening, I had a singular experience of my own: receiving a set of truths only the oral can bring (the hesitation of speech, the crescendo of sound, the aftermath of taste). I felt grateful for a sense of political contradictions and incoherencies left to linger in the recording. In the interview, Rascoe gives her listeners not simply a taste of the Party, so to speak—its strategies, histories, successes, and missteps—but also her taste, a sensation that shifts, changes over time, and develops with discernment.
Rascoe spoke to Singleton from Yonkers, New York, not far from where she was born in Ossining in the racially segregated Westchester County. Before she joined the Party, Rascoe first started reading the Black Panther newspaper after taking the train to 125th Street to hang out with a girlfriend in Harlem and go to the Apollo Theater. “I wanted to get The Black Panther newspaper; I wanted to look at it; I wanted to read it. But I didn’t really want to talk to my girlfriends about it,” she admitted. “I was far more interested in boys, far more interested in food and chocolate.”
When she turned eighteen, she moved to California to be with her childhood sweetheart. “I told myself, if the two of us being together doesn’t work,” she says, “then I’m joining the Black Panther Party, and I would definitely feel that that was my calling.” In a Cadillac with no brakes, she would drive from North Hollywood with her boyfriend to the Black Panther Headquarters to take political education classes, where participants read the newspaper or revolutionary literature like Mao Tse-tung. She describes her entry into the Black Panther Party as another kind of romance:
“We would go and have class there and I think that my boyfriend knew how interested I was in it but I don’t think he really understood that those were the times that were going to mark the end of he and I being together and the beginning of me being romanced by the Black Panther Party.”
It was the early 1970s. She was attracted to the discussions about politics, as well as the mutual aid programs, which included hosting free breakfast programs, distributing shoes, clothes, groceries, and organizing free ambulance services and health care.
Soon, she went underground – with just a handful of others, mostly women. “I was entirely too crazy for my own good, and the experience was nothing like I was prepared for,” she told Singleton. The network of the underground included safe houses for people coming through Southern California needing protection from threats, whether it be from the police, rival gangs, prosecution, or jail time. This kind of tunneling system had, for Rascoe, “some of the most self-sacrificing young people I’ve met.” She and her comrades were often not sure about the larger dynamics at play, but rather were “human bookmarks” to be “used for something” down the line.
When asked by Singleton how gender plays a part in revolution and how she started to understand sexism while in the Party and the underground, Rascoe first says, “I love that question in part because you’re asking a question that some people would answer very differently.” She mentions the 2022 photobook Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party by Stephen Shames, who is considered the principal photographer of the Panthers from 1967 to 1973, and Ericka Huggins, a leading member of the Party. Part of what Comrade Sisters did was clarify the fact that there were more women than men in the Black Panther Party.
The language was not always there to diagnose the critical situation. “There was no one single way that you could say we all looked at sexism,” she remarked. “I don’t know if it was actually a word then. I definitely did not hear the word ‘misogyny’ the entire time that I was in the Black Panther Party.” In terms of how she felt as a woman in this revolutionary setting:
“When we were together and we were home, it was the sisters and maybe one or two of the brothers. But there was not a single sister that said, here’s what we’re doing and we’re doing this now. Here’s the plan for tomorrow. In fact, the people who were in charge of that were all men.”
And when women in the Party received unwanted attention from men:
“We didn’t have our complaints warmly received. There was not a feeling of protection there was not the feeling of we appreciate you, we got your back and brothers and sisters are the same.”
It has taken Rascoe decades to unpack and reflect on the gender dynamics in the underground. “I don’t think that any of us were thinking that this was a terrible thing, that we were being treated differently or used,” she says. “I think that we were all proud to serve but that later in life when we looked at things, that’s when we saw, hey, wait a minute, what was I doing?”
In 2025, for Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, I wrote about how the idea of aftertaste, muddling desire and disgust, troubles the contemporary radical’s search for redress and recovery. I had been curious about how an attention to aftertaste exposes criticism and interpretation as a carnal practice that is especially telling for anonymous Black women in the archive. I had been looking at colonial documents from the 17th century, but being introduced to Rascoe’s story—and most importantly, the way she tells her story—further demonstrates how what we want from the past does not always match up with what happened, the wanting itself being a challenge to uncover in part because of our manipulated and hypermediated present.
“Can we hear that? Can we sit with the discomfort that may bring,
that revolutionary desire sent her out of her mind?“
Listening to the interview, I noticed how profoundly our contemporary hegemonic language of self-care doesn’t apply. Rascoe really wants to emphasize that she was “crazy.” Comparing her time underground to being in a cult (secrets, isolation, loss of autonomy, psychological turmoil), her mental health was, understandably, compromised by the stress and lack of personal autonomy: “I was insane. I had at least one nervous breakdown. I was literally on the edge, as you can imagine, not having control over whether or not you would be able to purchase new underwear.” With that insistence, Singleton kept wanting to know how Rascoe kept on, how she managed. But she barely did.
Can we hear that? Can we sit with the discomfort that may bring, that revolutionary desire sent her out of her mind? “My downtime, my meditation, my artsy side—it didn’t exist,” she replies, when asked about how she “nourished” herself during the period. (Is this a negation of pleasure writ large? Elsewhere in the interview, food takes on a status of scarcity and promise, a symbol of the commingling of need and desire.) Regardless, urgency charged the atmosphere: “I didn’t have that enjoyment factor that was going on then. I was in service—hardcore service and really having myself subordinated to a higher good.” Today, she adores dancing, which is, for her, a “complete freedom,” and especially drumming, all that “sweating and jumping and arms flailing about.”
“Those of us who came up after the Panthers and live in their wake
must contend with the complications and complexities of the revolutionary past
if we are committed to challenging our political imagination.“
After processing what happened in all those years, including in an unpublished memoir, Rascoe refuses to put a bow on her experience in the Party—for us, for her, for history, for anyone. On that note, I was particularly struck by the following exchange in the interview, which reveals some of the desires we have to find fixity in histories still in flux, to find freedom in histories of unfreedom:
Singleton: In this moment, what made it worth it for you?
Rascoe: I didn’t say it was.
Singleton: So you don’t think it was?
Rascoe: I didn’t say that either.
Those of us who came up after the Panthers and live in their wake must contend with the complications and complexities of the revolutionary past if we are committed to challenging our political imagination.
Rascoe is just one of the many women involved in the work of the Black Panthers who have complicated feelings about their time in the Party. I find it fascinating that an art book promoted as the first book to tell the story of the women of the Black Panther Party is a collection of photographs taken by a white man. Our textual language has yet to be found. Working on her memoir, Rascoe wanted to get in touch with some of the other women from the Party. Some are hard to find. Some gave birth while underground. Some can’t touch the trauma. Some refuse to be in contact with the party. Some don’t respond. “None of the women I was underground with have even said yeah, I’ll talk to you,” she says. And that is partially why the answer for Rascoe to the question of whether or not it was worth it is still being worked out and worked through.
I recall the novelist Gayl Jones, who was 25 when she published these words in Corregidora:
It had to be sexual, I was thinking, it had to be something sexual that Great Gram did to Corregidora. I knew it had to be sexual: “What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” In a split second I knew what it was, and I think he might have known too. A moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin: “I could kill you.”
How do black women navigate repressed histories of sexual violence, a legacy of slavery? Rather than correct and fix, wash over the sexual violence, our duty is to let the contradictions sit, let them stew, let the bad taste linger.
