51 pages • 1 hour read
Assata ShakurAssata: An Autobiography
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Personal and the Political
“The personal is political” is a slogan popularized by Carol Hanisch through her 1970 essay of the same title. This statement became closely associated with second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. It makes what was at the time a radical claim: that the experiences women had in the private domestic sphere had political merit, especially when it came to the fight for pay equity in the workforce and fair distribution of labor. While Shakur does not ascribe to second-wave feminist ideology, she acknowledges in her autobiography that her radicalization was built from the efforts of movements that preceded her, which included Black activism from the Civil Rights era.
Shakur’s understanding of the relationship between the personal and the political draws from her recognition that as a Black revolutionary woman, her personal experiences when it came to racism, sexism, and targeting by the state not only had an intimate impact on her wellbeing, but also fueled her political activism. While her autobiography explores less of her relationship to the domestic sphere, her discussion of her intimate involvement across different organizing communities becomes a way of articulating her relationship between her personal experiences and the politics behind them.
The autobiographical project is in many ways a demonstration of “The personal is political” for Shakur. While the central event is the New Jersey Turnpike shooting trial, she also devotes several chapters to narrating events and lessons from her childhood. These include her realization, “We had never heard the words ‘Black is beautiful’” (30) while growing up and her vow that she would never utter “‘Black’ and ‘ugly’ in the same sentence” (72). For Shakur, these sentiments were deeply personal as well as political, as the internalization of negative notions about Black identity perpetuated white supremacist ideas about Blackness. These beliefs prevented Black communities from feeling that they had a right to fight for justice. By pointing to these moments in her childhood, Shakur indicates that the strongest political strategies come from a desire to repair these personal experiences and create a better world.
Political Education as Alternative Education
Shakur’s experience in the US educational system was often marked by inequality and even outright racist abuse. In elementary school, her white teachers picked on her, disciplining her and other Black students more harshly than they did the white students. Their humiliation of her made her feel like a “fool” (33) and she became one of the “favorite targets” (34) of a teacher who openly abused her Black students. Her mother was sympathetic and “acutely aware of the racism and hostility that Black children are exposed to from the time they enter school” (35). Despite her mother’s support, these experiences made traditional schooling an unpleasant experience for her. In addition to this abuse, Shakur was taught a version of US history that, she later came to believe, had been designed to perpetuate and justify white supremacy, and the contributions of Black communities and Black leaders were often conspicuously left out.
It was not until Shakur attended Manhattan Community College that she encountered approaches to history, sociology, and other subjects that introduced her to various aspects of Black life that she had not learned in school before. She attended classes and extracurricular activities with other Black students, extending her education in Black history beyond the classroom. She learned from this experience that “The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them” (181). This meant that Shakur’s early education reflected the racism of the Jim Crow South in which that education took place; its effect was to further disempower Black students who were already dealing with underfunded and under-resourced schools. Shakur knew even as a child that her disdain for school stemmed not from a lack of desire to learn but from the hostile classroom environment. Later, when she began to learn how much had been left out of her early education, this realization helped to convince her of the need for radical, societal change.
The Differences Between Revolution and Reform
While Shakur’s autobiography details the many legal strategies her defense team took to prove her innocence, Shakur eventually concluded that participation in the US court system was a tacit endorsement of reform rather than revolution. While she had no choice but to go through the trials or face longer incarceration, she also believed that her participation perpetuated a farce. If acquitted, the verdict would lend support to the notion that the US legal system is just and—by extension—that those in prison (among whom Black Americans are disproportionately represented) deserve to be there. If found guilty, the court’s performance of impartial fact-finding would serve to justify her incarceration.
Shakur states, “It was plain to me that we couldn’t look to the kourts for freedom and justice any more than we could expect to gain our liberation by participating in the u.s. political system, and it was pure fantasy to think we could gain them by begging” (243). For Shakur, the act of arguing her innocence in court was analogous to the act of participating in electoral democracy: It meant pushing for incremental reforms within a system that is fundamentally unjust. In her view, the kinds of reforms that could be achieved by these means were not only insufficient but actively harmful, serving to perpetuate an unjust system by giving it the appearance of moving toward justice.
Shakur’s growing disdain for the US justice system came from this realization of its futility as well as how it opposes true revolution. For Shakur, political reform served as a kind of pressure release valve, preventing revolution by giving oppressed people incremental victories to assuage their anger. Shakur did not oppose these reforms in themselves; rather, she held that those fighting for freedom must not allow incremental victories to distract them from the real goal, which is the overthrow of the unjust system itself. She advocated a revolutionary strategy that was “political as well as military” (242), meaning that armed resistance against oppression should be coupled with education and mutual aid, building networks of community support to function as a more just alternative to the societal mainstream.
