Assata is Innocent & the Myth of Moderate Liberal Tolerance

Assata, Dr. King & the White Moderate Liberal

Today’s quotation comes from Assata Shakur’s highly-readable “Assata: An Autobiography.” While as a general rule, I’m not typically a big fan of autobiographies, in light of the now 40 some odd year US federal law enforcement campaign to portray Shakur as a murderous terrorist, I decided to make an exception when I purchased “Assata.” If nothing else, I figured it would be useful to have around as a legal record of US state abuses toward liberation activists – I knew the US government had lied about Shakur’s “crimes” and I wanted to know more about precisely what was true and what was false. It’s certainly fair to say my expectations were modest, in light of my general disinterest in the autobiographical format.

When I started reading the book however, I was both surprised and delighted by Shakur’s work; brimming with personal observations, breathtaking poetry and that rarest of treats, dialogue that rings true like an exact memory (as opposed to dramatization) – “Assata: an Autobiography” remains one of my most cherished books to this day.

So what about the US government’s charges? As it turns out, pretty much everything was false; to quote a 2014 Guardian profile about the longstanding and ongoing plot to convict Shakur:

“From 1971 to 1973, Shakur was alleged to have committed a series of audacious crimes (six cases in total), sometimes alongside other members of the BLA: two bank robberies in New York, the kidnap and murder of a drug dealer, armed robbery (during which she was shot), and the attempted murder of policemen in an ambush. She was either acquitted or the cases dismissed. Then came the events of 2 May 1973, in which Trooper Foerster and Zayd Malik Shakur were killed…

In January 1977, after years of incarceration, the case was brought before a judge and jury in New Jersey. There is much evidence to suggest the trial was not fair: transcripts of the jury selection show at least two of the jurors expressed prejudice before the start of the trial. There was evidence that the offices of the defence team were being bugged, and materials relating to her case that went missing from the home of her late lawyer Stanley Cohen were later found with the New York City police. Hinds called the trial “a legal lynching and a kangaroo court”. The defence could not get an expert witness to testify. As Shakur noted: “It was obvious I didn’t have one chance in a million of receiving any kind of justice.” She testified holding on to a photo of her daughter (conceived with fellow BLA member Kamau Sadiki while they were both in jail, and born in 1974). The jury reached a verdict after 24 hours – she was found guilty on all seven counts.”

While there are many (including US law enforcement) who choose to ignore the staggering amount of evidence (from COINTELPRO to FBI forensics and police ballistics reports) proving definitively that Shakur was framed, the totality of evidence makes it clear that Assata is innocent.

All of which brings us back to the above quotation and Shakur’s (justifiably) dim view of the constantly-shifting chimera that is American liberalism. Sharp-eyed readers will immediately notice that Shakur’s criticism (published in 1987) strongly echoes the thoughts of radical, left wing Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in his now-famous rebuke of the “white moderate” in 1960′s America:

“…I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

While Dr. King’s admonishment (naturally) focused on racial injustice, and Shakur’s critique implied a broader view that integrated economic questions, it’s important to understand that both of these (highly interrelated) discussions tackle a lack of solidarity with marginalized peoples among liberals (moderates, as opposed to the radical left) whose focus on maintaining the status quo is rooted in self interest.

While the ideological chasm between mainstream liberals and the American left (such as it is) will come as no surprise to most of the people reading this, the objective truth is that this gap is not acknowledged in mainstream media and political discourse. This is naturally because the elite “liberal” establishment in the west has a vested interest in portraying politics and policies to their left as extreme, hopelessly idealistic or in some cases, reactionary (see “horseshoe theory” or the ongoing smear campaign in the “liberal” media to imply that leftists dissidents are somehow “the same” as fascists.)

This phenomenon, when combined together with the staggering success  enjoyed by conservative think tanks and billionaire Republican donors in their never-ending quest to shift the US political Overton window to the right, helps explain why there really is no “left wing” political party in America’s two-party system – just as it helps explain why the increasingly unhinged US “conservative movement” could describe a milquetoast, center-right imperialist like former US President Barack Obama as a socialist, or even in some extreme cases, as a communist.

Furthermore, while Shakur is obviously discussing American liberalism, this same “center-right” political ideology that self identifies as “liberal” can be found in dominant or at least influential factions in Canadian, British, French and German politics as well.

Perhaps this is because western liberalism is largely a child of the vaunted Enlightenment and in many ways represented a civil rights movement for the petite-bourgeois against the upper classes in Europe: the bourgeois, the aristocracy and ultimately, the crown. Having obtained the right to their own portion of the national franchise, liberalism in the west has since that time shifted towards a conservative philosophy designed to protect the gains of the affluent petite-bourgeois from the demands of the true proletariat. This would then in turn explain why despite its portrayal as a pro-middle class ideology, liberalism has always struggled to maintain the support of western labor – as the working class (of all races, genders and creeds) has always tended to be both more radical and more unabashedly left wing than the merchant or professional class that forms the backbone of liberal support in western democracies.

– nina illingworth