On Assata Shakur and political education
Since we launched Religion in Revolt last month, I keep returning to Assata: An Autobiography.
As part of the community Dwayne and I are inviting others into, we want to help readers interrogate how and why empires are created, enabled, and maintained. We believe political education, a commitment to accurately studying and analyzing life under oppressive systems as Black people, is crucial to the liberation work we are called to do as faithful people.
As part of this invitation, Assata is crucial reading.
Originally published in 1987, the autobiography was written after Assata escaped prison and fled to Cuba. Assata, a political activist involved with the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panthers and an important figure in the history of U.S. Black Liberation revolutionaries, was falsely convicted as an accomplice in the murder of a white state trooper. In 1973, she was shot and chained to a hospital bed, including while she was pregnant. She spent four years incarcerated before escaping in 1979. Five years later, she was in Cuba, where she remains today. Unless she is pardoned she cannot return to the United States.
The autobiography is deeply poignant, a mix of poetry, history, and memoir. It is not an easy read. It is terrifying to read so clearly how violently the state represses revolutionaries and people committed to challenging the structures and systems that exploit and kill workers and all oppressed peoples worldwide. It is difficult to read her words and see how disposable the state viewed her body, her child.
The way the state treats Assata, the way her body was violated by law enforcement conditioned to repress or kill women and men fighting for freedom, demonstrates how deeply foundational patriarchy and misogynoir are to state violence.
I read Assata in 2022 for the first time after several comrades recommended sitting with Assata’s life and liberation work more fully.
They recommended I read the text—along with Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa—as part of my political education, a commitment to authentically study, analyze, and learn how politics, money, and power serve the few while exploiting most of us. Assata, many shared, would help me understand our world and history and why we live in our current socio-economic conditions as workers and oppressed peoples and the role of Black women in liberation work. Her life and work would help to answer many of the questions I was asking.
I read the text for months and months, slowly, admiring how the political activist describes moving away from the belief that integration and whiteness would save us. She teaches how liberation cannot lie in patriotism or trying to change the morality of our oppressors. Those who control our country and world also have the most money, and those with this power use racism to maintain control.
She describes how little she understood the world and history until she was older, and she shares a clear analysis and understanding of how our country and world function in Chapter 8:
White people, whether they are from the North or from the South, whether it was in 1960 or 1980, benefit from the oppression of Black people. Those who believe that the president or vice-president and the congress and the supreme kourt run this country are sadly mistaken. The almighty dollar is king; those who have the most money control the country and, through campaign contributions, buy and sell presidents, congressmen, and judges, the ones who pass the laws and enforce the laws that benefit their benefactors.
She describes how this understanding informs her Black Liberation work and the violence she faced from the state in an almost detached, observant manner that makes the violence she faced even more striking.
I appreciate how Assata writes about herself, her political evolution, before connecting her experience to a larger critique of the United States, its criminal justice system, and prisons.
Her prose is precise, confident, unafraid, and historical.
“I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.”
“I believe in life.”
This is one of the many lines I return to, again and again, in Assata’s autobiography. I am moved by her unrelenting commitment to life and liberation—by her unrelenting commitment to make workers worldwide, especially Americans, understand that Black and Brown people have never been free here, but we have fought despite and with this fear.
It reminds me that liberation/revolution is a deep love and commitment to preserving human life and dignity, particularly for those most oppressed under empire. I am deeply moved and inspired by how bluntly Assata describes how money, not politicians or celebrities, runs our state and world and how transparently she describes being fearful and angry. Both emotions are a part of the liberatory work we are called to do.
I often romanticize revolution and liberation, imagining fearless women and men who never cower, never doubt, never cry, never fear. Yet the more I learn from my community and comrades, from revolutionaries like Assata, and the more I understand history, the more I reject this romanticizing. Knowing you are mobilizing against a state that is heavily funded and militarized is not easy; imagining and creating a life outside of our capitalist, white, patriarchal oppression is not easy.
“I am still scared, but i am just as angry and evil as i am scared,” she writes. Assta fought and continues to fight. She embodies hope.
A Call for Praxis
Along with helping us to better educate ourselves about how the United States functions, including the racism of our criminal justice system, Assata teaches us that fully empowered and embodied Black womanhood threatens whiteness and empires—that Black women have always and will always lead liberation.
She invites us to think, fight, and live outside the white, neocolonial imagination. She demonstrates what it means to fight and believe in freedom for all. She educates me and allows me to analyze and understand the world anew.
Her life and work challenge me to continue to find moments of consolation in knowledge building and political education, particularly while the state actively works to erase, limit, and revise imperial history. We must understand why most of the world lives the way it does, why a small group of people and corporations control our daily lives, and what building solidarity and liberation with workers worldwide means.
We must continue to ask questions of ourselves, others, and the ways in which we have internalized the very capitalist, white, patriarchal systems that prohibit Assata and all political prisoners from returning to their cities of birth.
Assata helps us understand how empires exist more fully and invites us to put our political education into praxis, to more deeply look for, uplift, and emulate examples of revolution worldwide, especially those led by workers and oppressed groups fighting for their freedom: Garment workers in India. Indigenous Hawaiians against developers. Haitians against foreign violence. Ecuadorians against the fossil fuel industry.
People are mobilizing and building and fighting together. This is not easy work, and part of what sustains capitalist, white, patriarchal oppression is the fear, desolation, and desperation it instills in us. The state wants to divide, to fearmonger, to incarcerate, to kill. It forces us to flee, both literally and symbolically.
Despite this, Black and Brown people, revolutionaries like Assata, continue to live and fight and educate and believe in life.
In solidarity,
-Olga