Book Review: Assata
- I will be adapting Assata’s modified grammar and spelling (i.e. “amerika”, “u.s.” and the use of the lowercase “i” to refer to herself)
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Ever since I became impassioned by Black Radical Thought, Assata Shakur’s autobiography has been a high priority read. Assata was everything I expected and more. Reading her book felt like welcoming a precious and anticipated toolkit to my mental archive. This was much more than an intellectual activity. It was like collecting valuable instructions a mentor had left me. As someone ever searching for more guides for how to actually make real change in the world, especially from an Afrocentric perspective, Assata was paramount. Beyond the considerable ideological insights I collected, I was enchanted by Assata’s personality and writing style. Her thoughts are blunt and funny. I laughed audibly when in chapter 4 she describes a friend’s brother as “evil-looking” (77) or when she discusses her experimenting with Catholicism and says, “It was all so spooky i just knew that this had to be the real God” (41). I was roused by her vigor and knack for living life on the edge. In her teenage years she talks about running away: “The part I dug about it, though, was surviving…. like living on a roller-coaster, everything hurling itself at you at breakneck speed.” (75). Assata’s frank writing style and spirited personality are the compelling mediums through which her ideas and important story are told.
Assata reads like a raw audit of american society. Through her ideas and writing style, she strips down the façade of “amerika” and illuminates the logics of violence at the heart of u.s. structure. My forever ongoing skepticisms of u.s. society feel validated by her words: “Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie” (158). On par with her pragmatic writing style, her retelling of u.s. history isn’t dressed up in fancy analytical words. Rather she rips off the clothes of the american fallacy with her real, crude, language as if she’s crying out at us in exasperation. She brings up points like, “Little did i know Lincoln was an archracist who had openly expressed his disdain for Black people” (33). In chapter 12, she blows up the foundational myth that Lincoln’s motives in the Civil war had anything to do with freeing Black people as well as the myth that the northern half of the country was at all any more concerned with the human rights of Black Americans. Rather, Lincoln “clearly did not believe Black people could live in the u.s. as equal citizens” (178) and Assata cites Lincoln’s very serious explorations of a way to send all Black Americans to Liberia. She informs us that the Civil War was not about slavery but instead a war between two economic systems, a plantation slave economy and an industrial manufacturing economy. On earlier amerikan history, she writes about George Washington as being “probably a big liar” who once sold a slave for a keg of rum and makes it very clear then when he fought in the Revolutionary War, he was fighting for white people, rich white people (33).
Her exposure of amerikan society moves far beyond historical retellings. The book jumps between Assata’s story of imprisonment and her life leading up to it. Throughout her autobiographical tellings of her pre-prison life she describes a gradual breakage from any and all illusory promises of the system. This process felt deeply relatable. Very close to my heart is the way she describes her experience existing within the status quo of amerikan life. Discussing her time working an office job, she says “i was one of those slaves where you pay a fifth of your salary for taxes, some more for social security, another $5 a month for union dues, and the rest was not even enough to die on”(148). Her description of this life as a slave reminds me of Marcuse’s sentiment in chapter 2 of One-Dimensional Man that discusses workers in contemporary society as de facto slaves since they are treated by the system as mere instruments of production. Assata’s review of her life working in amerikan society is one that exposes the hidden irrationality of a seemingly rational system. This also calls to mind Ralph Ellison’s quote at the end of Invisible Man “And the mind that has conceived of a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.” Existing in amerikan society is a sense of a flowing standard that seems to be functional, but when one stops and peaks under the fragile pattern that is flowing, it’s possible to see a system is much more irrational than it appears. This seems to be something Assata picked up on when she tried to be a regular participant of the amerikan working world. There is an illusory freedom in this capitalistic system, but for Assata it deeply lacks meaning, “my life was being spent pushing around meaningless papers that had nothing to do with living” (148). She is relieved when she is fired from one of these office jobs.
An incredibly important piece of this exposure of amerika emerges through her connection with African international students who she describes as “intense, serious, [who] had so much dignity” (150). Through these conversations, the extent of u.s. propaganda is uncovered. When asked by these students about her opinion on the Vietnam war, Assata responds with a positive sentiment about the u.s. fighting communism and bringing democracy to Vietnam. The African brother she’s speaking with enlightens her with a detailed overview of Vietnam history and tells her of the real u.s. motives including money, corporate interest, and military bases. Assata writes, “There he was, talking about the u.s. government just like somebody would talk about a criminal…my mind was blown” (151). When asked about communism, Assata realizes that her images of communism were ambiguous and incomplete: “i had been hooping and hollering about something that I didn’t even understand. i know i didn’t know what the hell communism was, and yet i’d been dead set against it” (152). With this, she illuminates the propaganda function of the u.s. government, saying “i never thought i could be so easily tricked into being against something i didn’t understand” (152). As Assata is digesting this new information, a friend ask her why it’s hard to believe, “just look at what they’re doing to you” (152).
More of her disillusionment with amerikan society is described shortly after this event in chapter 10. She writes, “The difference between the Africans and the other friends i hung out with that summer was startling” (152). It seems that these other friends are much more concerned with finding the most amount of “success” within the present system of amerikan society. She describes a setting on the beach where friends try to set her up with a guy who touts his material success, discussing various name-brand possessions. As he touts his MG convertible and Remi Marty cognac, Assata sarcastically says she waits “expectantly, for him to tell me his brand of toothpaste” (153). Shortly following she describes the overall social setting she observes on this day at the beach:
“i am picking up snatches of conversations from all around me. Talks of grants, poverty programs, and democratic politics. Talk of the NFL, and the football season. Talk of Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue. About speedboats and cruisers which nobody owns but everybody wants to…Social workers talking about their clients like dogs, teachers who don’t like to teach. A probation officer complaining about how dangerous his job is. A bunch of money- worshippers putting on a front for each other” (154). A few lines later, she asks, “How have we gotten so silly?” (155)
A similar critique comes after she discusses her experience getting lunch with a Black man who works in publishing. After describing their differences, Assata calls him “one of those Black people who think you are free if you can go into a store and buy expensive things” (156). Assata’s sense for avoiding this mindset has roots in her childhood, when she resisted her grandmother’s efforts to have her be part of the “talented tenth — the privileged class — part of the so-called black bourgeoisie” (21). For Assata, amassing individual wealth for the sake of owning or pursuing the ownership of materials was ridiculous. She writes that, “i want to help free the ghetto, not run away from it, leaving my people behind” (154). Assata is aware of the individualistic and alienating functions of this capitalistic society. The systemic pursuit of profit, fueled by a culture of overconsumption places people in a competitive rat race of pursuing individual wealth and material possession. The focus on consuming and amassing material wealth alienates people from themselves as well as from other people. Through the mechanisms of this system we are numbed to the problems experienced by the communities around us and we fail to see the ways our access to abundance is connected to the suffering of others. Additionally, a culture of overconsumption makes it difficult for us to find real meaning in our lives. Assata writes, “i want to be real…i don’t want to style and profile in front of nobody” (154).
There are a great many other examples of Assata’s unmasking of u.s. society. This includes her discussion of the police in Black communities as “a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint” (235–36). She also discusses the systemic lawlessness of the u.s. government: “When the government finds it convenient to follow its own laws and administrative procedures, it does. And when it finds that these same laws are inconvenient for their own purposes, it simply ignores them” (244). She also exposes some of the most dehumanizing elements of u.s. structural racism. This appears in her description of the housing complex of her friend Lil-Bit. Arriving at her friend’s house Assata writes, “i couldn’t believe it. i thought i had seen some messed-up cribs before, but hers took the cake. She lived in a tiny little pea-green closet of a room, covered wall-to-wall with roaches” (134). Upon meeting Lil-Bit’s mother and neighbors, Assata says “i got my first lesson in hopelessness” (134).
Reading Assata also really showed me why her work and life are so celebrated within revolutionary circles. Much of this has to do with her stunning courage and ability to withstand the abuse she endured in the prison system, which I will discuss momentarily. The other half of this, I believe, is the ideology Assata presents in this book. Assata gives us precious insights of how to engage in critical thought and revolutionary work. Her insights are as valuable as any celebrated intellectual and yet her ideas are very unpretentious, raw, and convincing. She presents her ideas with confidence while neglecting self-importance. She reads as someone who is clearly very well educated who has no interest in lording her intelligence over people. What drives her is a desire for concrete, material changes. A valuable element of her ideology is that she isn’t caught up in any delusions of the status quo. In discussions with comrades she writes, “we always started out talking about reform and ended up talking about revolution…i was long past the day when i thought that reform could possibly work” (183). Assata also balances optimism with the awareness that real revolution is scientific and takes time to achieve. In chapter 17, she writes “One of the hardest lessons we had to learn is that revolutionary struggle is scientific rather than emotional”. A strikingly important aspect of Assata’s mindset is her open-mindedness regarding other forms of thinking and believing. This is highlighted in chapter 19 through her interaction with the Puerto Rican political prisoner Lolita Lebron. Assata talks about how certain “pseudo-revolutionary robots…attacked her for her religious beliefs, telling her that to be a revolutionary she had to give up her belief in God. It apparently had never occurred to these fools that Lolita was more revolutionary than they could ever be, and that her religion helped her to remain strong and committed all those years. i was infuriated by their crass misguided arrogance”(256). Throughout the book, Assata also talks about her experimentation with Catholicism, and she mentions observing Ramadan in prison shortly after her pregnancy. Besides the religious sphere, Assata also makes it a point to learn from other perspectives like when she sought out the Red Army in San Francisco, a group of Chinese-American revolutionaries. Assata’s life experience shows her to be someone who is not a blind follower of anything. She engages critically with a wide range of philosophies, not shutting down or accepting anything at face value. Upon meeting members of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, she criticizes the way they talk with people and encourages them to draw from certain behavioral dispositions of the Civil Rights Movement leaders and Black Muslims. She is a stellar example of the mental-flexibility, constructive criticism, and self-reflection that is necessary in revolutionary work.
A longer discussion of her work with the Black Panther Party further illuminates Assata’s ability to constructively criticize all ways of thinking and doing. In her initial interactions with the California Panthers, Assata describes her deep respect for the party and how she was heavily influenced by them. One of the most important things she says that the Panthers did was make clear who the enemy was: “not the white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors. They took the Black liberation struggle out of a national context and put it in an international context” (203). However, she also doesn’t hesitate to later discuss her disagreements with the function of the Panther party, especially in work with the New York branches. At that point she writes, “Politically, i was not at all happy with the direction of the Party” (226). She talks about how Huey Newton, though greatly respected, was not a good speaker and how people who walk out “in droves” (226). She discusses the issue of the Panther party not cultivating an environment where self-criticism and criticism were encouraged. Without constructive criticism Assata asserts that “people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them” (226). On the organizational and structural issues of the party she writes “everything had an arbitrary air to it, and i certainly did not have the feeling we were waging a step-by-step analytical struggle” (226). I was surprised to learn of Assata’s many grievances with the Black Panther Party. Ultimately, however, I am very inspired by her capacity to be constructively critical about the work and ideologies she engages with. Her experience supports the idea that criticism is fundamentally important for any form of revolutionary struggle that hopes to create change. No ideology should be accepted blindly. No ideology should be blindly rejected.
Very important in Assata’s way of thinking is her push to the readers to not just know but to do. This is highlighted in various places in the book as well. She writes, “Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory…i was determined to do both” (180). Assata discusses how she never wanted to be just an intellectual, risking the possibility of a life in which you just think without acting. A quote from chapter 13 has been echoing in my mind since I first read it: “If you know what’s happening and you don’t do anything but sit on your ass, then you’re nothing but a punk” (207). I appreciate her urgent sentiment to act on what we know. It is not merely important to adapt a consciousness about the predatory elements of the system we live in. Once we have the consciousness it becomes even more of a responsibility to act on what we know. The other side of this is the fact is that if we only think about oppression passively, we will grow complacent. Acting on what we know helps to keep the consciousness alive. Assata says, “The less you think about oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free you have to be acutely aware of being a slave” (262). A contemporary issue we have is the collective acquiescence to the omnipresent forms of oppression that impact all of us. Our society is not normal. Our ties to consumerism, our overwork culture, the fact that we have pedophiles as ruling officials who take our money to wage war in the name of profit. We live in a dystopian world and we all bear at least a partial brunt of its oppressive mechanisms. More urgently, the ones of us who live more comfortably are entirely too passive to the reality that our abundance stems directly from the suffering of others in the world. This is also something Assata discusses. She says, “Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other people’s freedom as well,” (267). Assata encourages us to practice a real mindset of consciousness. And this requires the combination of thinking with theory and acting on it.
One of the most important functions of Assata is to enlighten us to the extent of the brutality of the u.s. (in)justice system. The conditions of Assata’s arrest and imprisonment are shocking. From her arrest in 1973 all the way until her escape in 1979, Assata endured excessive amounts of physical, psychological, and structural abuse. The mistreatment begins shortly after she is apprehended and put in a hospital following the shooting on the new jersey turnpike with police officers. After being wrongfully accused of shooting an officer, Assata is kept in chains in the hospital room and guarded by state troopers round the clock who repeatedly physically abuse her in spite of her injuries. They point guns at her and pull the trigger without her knowing that the guns are empty. Similar abuses follow her as she is taken from prison to prison between new jersey and new york. Worse, Assata spends significant time in solitary confinement and maximum security prisons without even being convicted of any of the charges against her. Of course, Assata is aware that the real reason she is kept in prisons and demonized by the media is because she is a threat to the oppressive structure of the u.s.. And she isn’t alone. She writes, “Throughout amerika’s history, people have been imprisoned because of their political beliefs and charged with criminal acts in order to justify that imprisonment”(16). Earlier in chapter 3, Assata discusses the issue of mass incarceration in the u.s. and how it disproportionately impacts people of color. In a transcript of a tape she broadcasted entitled “To My People”, she calls prisons “concentration camps”, highlighting the reality that prisons are money-making ventures (51). In her earlier days of incarceration, Assata realizes after an interaction with a guard that slavery is legal in prison according to the 13th amendment. She states, “Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery” (65).
The worst case of abuse occurs when Assata is pregnant. During her first month of pregnancy, at roosevelt hospital, Assata is once again chained to a hospital bed with round-the-clock guards who also sit and point guns at her head. After her discharge from the hospital, Assata spends the next three months of her pregnancy in solitary confinement in the middlesex county jail for men. When transferred to rikers island, she describes being anemic and malnourished. She was placed in the infirmary where she was left for three days with a woman who was later found out to have tuberculosis. Due to the mistreatment, Assata develops more medical issues related to her pregnancy, including anemia and monilia. Hospital officials also tried to restrict her from being seen by her trusted doctor, Dr. Garrett. Doctors treated her with an extreme lack of care and respect. She gives in to let one doctor examine her when she enters labor but calls it a mistake since after he did so she was inexpiably bleeding. Assata’s instincts led her to not trust any of the doctors at the hospital and she told them, “I’m delivering the baby myself”. After a standoff between the hospital doctors and officials, against the backdrop of protestors outside, they finally allowed the baby to be delivered by Dr. Garrett. Assata was only able to see her baby for a few days after she was delivered. After that, she was separated from her child. Following her discharge and return to Rikers, Assata was beaten by a “goon squad” for refusing medical examination. Her pregnancy demonstrates Assata’s unbelievable resilience and astonishing ability to fight for her life and the life of her child in the face of relentless abuse. Her pregnancy appears to me as a metaphor for her entire incarceration. Beat down with the constant possibility to submit to violent oppression, Assata defies the odds and ultimately is able to give birth to her daughter, the way she is able to ultimately escape and live freely in Cuba. Within heavy, violent oppression, a hopeful future manages to fight its way upward. A poem at the end of chapter 7 shines light on the rebellious nature of love, alluding to the love encompassed in pregnancy. “Love Is contraband in Hell,/ cause love is an acid / that eats away bars…. We are pregnant with freedom / We are a conspiracy.” (130).
The extent of the corruption in the (in)justice system is also exposed by the jury selection process. It is demonstrative of the way that racism and propaganda can manipulate a trial. Jury members would claim to have no prejudices against Black people, but when pressed, these prejudices were ultimately exposed. After her lawyer, her aunt Evelyn, pressed the jurors on specific questions to expose their biases Assata writes, “Most of them preferred to be excused rather than have their feelings towards Black people…questioned and explored. When you think about the fact that the average Black defendant on trial gets to ask prospective jurors only a few perfunctory questions, you can see why so many Black people go to jail.” (165). Other elements of the injustice system are exposed through the way that judges routinely raise bail too high for black defendants and get punished for doing otherwise. Additionally, Assata’s story demonstrates how evidence and ways of finding evidence are manipulated. In chapter 18, her lawyer Stanely Cohen is very concerningly found dead after making progress to track down key witnesses in an otherwise impossible situation. His cause of death remains mysterious and unknown, and afterwards, al the legal papers dealing with Assata’s case was missing.
There is much more that could be said about the egregious details of Assata’s incarceration, her incredible ability to survive, and her critical revolutionary insights. I could spend several more pages discussing Assata’s poetry, her insights about Black hair, and her transnational perspectives. Ultimately, Assata’s biography is a paramount text for anyone passionate about tearing down domestic and global systems of oppression.
