David, Goliath, and the Black Panthers

Abstract

Both the Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an tell the story of David and Goliath, in which David, a youth armed only with stones and a sword, challenges and kills the giant Goliath, thus securing the victory of the Israelites over the Philistines. The event was a military victory; it also created and secured the identity of a people with a sense of its own power. Today the phrase "David and Goliath" is used as shorthand to refer to a situation in which a smaller or significantly weaker force defeats a larger and much more powerful one.In this article, we develop a framework for examining the David and Goliath narrative when it is used as a rhetorical strategy in political and social movement discourse. We argue that the stance of the aggrieved Party (David) is a rhetorical resource that serves two functions for both mainstream political and oppositional social movement actors. First, it potentially legitimizes the use of violence in a social conflict by figuring political collectives as aggrieved victims. Second, it crafts a paradoxical collective persona: that of an oppressed militant (in the case of social movements) or a mighty victim (in the case of hegemonic powers), an agent who is at once both powerful and oppressed. It is beyond the scope of this article to analyze in detail the disparate treatment by the media of oppressed militants (framed negatively) and the hegemonic stance of "righteous victim" used to justify wars against weaker foes (framed positively). However, we make a note of this distinction's importance toward the conclusion of this article. Elsewhere

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