Thoughts on Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur’s text describes her life leading up to her eventual escape to Cuba. The structure of the book switches back and forth every chapter to describe her life in prison and the trials she encountered while the others described her life from birth to living in the South, growing up in Queens, NY, and her involvement with activism in the United States. Although the back and forth structure was sometimes confusing, she helped bridge the gap with poetry that facilitated the reading. Numerous observations on the part of Shakur merit further discussion, particularly her views on the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power organizations, and race relations abroad. Moreover, she never denounced armed self-defense or rejected the idea of armed guerrilla-warfare styled resistance or violence as a tactic, further complicating her relationship with activists of all kinds in her lifetime.
Interestingly, Shakur criticizes the mainstream Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s as doomed to fail due to an excessive focus on racial integration and relying on integration, something mainstream organizations like the NAACP used. In addition, a reliance on nonviolent tactics was bound to fail because they relied on moral suasion of whites. Arguing that no revolutionary struggle ever succeeded through moral suasion of their enemy, the Civil Rights Movement’s success would be limited. Another weakness she saw was a dependence on integration, the idea of putting black and white children into the same schools, living in the same neighborhoods, and magically whites would no longer see blacks as inferior. Though her characterization of the Civil Rights Movement has some accuracy regarding naiveté perhaps on the part of some activists and organizations, it perpetuates a false single narrative of the Civil Rights Movement that is surprising to see from Assata Shakur. As someone who believed in diversity of tactics as well as organizing underground and within the context of black community organizations, it is difficult to imagine Shakur sweeping away so much of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement and its accomplishments. Perhaps due to her negative experience with an NAACP instructor in civil disobedience for youth while in the South because she could never accept being spit upon, Shakur’s extreme generalization of the Civil Rights Movement reflected her own preference for armed self-defense.

On the issue of Black Power organizations engaged in the struggle, Shakur is also critical. Embracing many aspects of black cultural nationalism by taking on the name Assata Shakur and naming her child with an African name, too, Shakur rejects Joanne Chesimard as a slave name (186). A broader reflection of her investment in black cultural nationalism, however, was her involvement and interest in organizations like the New Republic of Afrika and challenging dominant Eurocentric views on history. However, she also criticized the reluctance on the part of some Black Liberation-oriented organizers on the issue of working with others, such as the Red Guard Chinese-American movement on the West Coast, which inhibited the internationalist dimension she saw all revolutionaries needing () Furthermore, she saw the Black Panther Party’s Political Education program as lacking because it focused on European and other non-African writers as well as the history of black resistance in the United States. For Shakur, this inhibited the organization’s ability to work alongside black community organizations (Shakur 221). That likely influenced her views on Huey P. Newton, who she saw as a poor speaker who was inaccessible to the masses because of his unclear words and intellectual jargon (227). Surprisingly, Shakur did not describe too many experiences with sexism, although her brief-marriage with a “brother in the struggle” ended poorly because he expected her to conform to a stereotypical gender role as a homemaker (196). Besides alluding to sexism in the criminal justice system and broader society, such as gangrape and harsh laws criminalizing poor women, there is no consciousness of herself as the only prominent Black Power figure connected to a male. Perhaps her joining the Black Liberation Army and having experienced both organizing breakfast programs as well as more leadership positions blinded her. Alternatively, while writing her autobiography in Cuba, she may have wanted to avoid casting further criticism of the Black Panthers and BLA to not tarnish their reputation or her involvement.

Shakur’s bias while writing in Cuba likely impacts her description of race relations in post-revolutionary Cuba, too. She describes Communist Cuba as lacking institutional and structural racism (270). Afro-Cubans and white Cubans mingle everywhere and she argues that Cuba’s history of racism lacked violent institutionalization (269). This surely represents either bias in favor of Cuba because racism has historically and currently its own problems with racism. Referring to Antonio Maceo and the collaboration of white and black Cubans in the wars of independence and the Cuban Revolution does not negate Cuban racism throughout the 20th century. Moreover, she cites a speech by Fidel Castro describing all Cubans as Afro-Cuban, which rhetorically masks ongoing differences and disparities. Regardless, her life in a society where anyone of African descent who was not very dark-skinned could be a mulatto or various other terms for people of varying shades, challenged her self-identity as a black woman, despite attempts by Cubans to label her as such (271). Intriguingly, she argues that a US-centered version of blackness that was influenced by the one-drop rule in America is better for people of African descent than “mulatto pride” in Cuba for the goal of inculcating pride in one’s African ancestry (271). So her criticism of racism in Cuba is present, but not overtly stated perhaps due to gratitude on the part of the Cuban government’s asylum.

Shakur’s text overall presents some interesting perspectives on black organizing as well as insight on Cuban race relations through the lens of an African-American activist. Her misrepresentation of the Civil Rights Movement has elements of truth, but her silence on misogyny within the Black Panther Party is baffling. Similarly, her blind eye to Cuban racism is surprising, although there are some critiques of Cuban race relations embedded in the conclusion. Like other forms of activism seen in the lives of Septima Clark or Amy Jacques Garvey, Shakur’s life included militant, underground activities as well as community-based uplift, like the Black Panther’s breakfast program in New York City.