preface…
i’d been experiencing a lot of turmoil recently. or maybe “recently” is the wrong word, because saying recently makes it sound temporary, contained, like turmoil is an interruption from ordinary life instead of something ambient. something expected. something people hand u quietly and assume youll learn to carry. push through. adapt. survive. and most of the time i do.
but there are moments, and i think everybody has them whether they admit it or not, where something ruptures. some contradiction collides with who u think u are, what u believe, what you’ve committed yourself to, and suddenly the ground underneath your principles feels less solid than u thought. something encounters u existentially. and youre left asking: what the fuck am i actually here for? what is any of this for? not in the dramatic sense. in the real sense. the exhausted sense. the sense that comes after disappointment and grief and watching people retreat into comfort or cynicism or obedience.
it’s usually a rupture that forces the question. maybe it’s always a rupture.
i’ve let go of the hope that people will simply “come to their senses.” i no longer believe clarity arrives naturally, or that suffering automatically produces consciousness, or that contradiction inevitably creates courage. history doesn’t support that. people survive by normalizing what should horrify them all the time.
still… i look in the mirror and i see an abolitionist.
maybe tired. maybe bruised. maybe bitter some days. maybe carrying disappointments i didn’t expect to survive. but every time, underneath all of that, i still see an abolitionist. i still see somebody committed to the possibility that people deserve more than domination, cages, abandonment, managed misery, and the endless instruction to endure what should never have existed.
and i think part of becoming committed to liberation, truly committed, is accepting something difficult: in this lifetime, u may willingly enter struggles u know u will not live to win. u may fight battles whose victories belong to people u will never meet. u may plant things knowing somebody else will sit in the shade.
that cannot be the reason to stop.
because duty is a strange thing. not duty to a nation or institution or flag. duty to each other. duty to the people being disappeared. duty to those who came before and lost and still left us instructions. duty to continue even when certainty is gone.
maybe that sounds tragic. i don’t mean it that way.
i mean: some of us survive by becoming a bridge.
and if someday people win freedoms we only knew in fragments, if someday the world breaks open in ways we could barely imagine, those victories will not appear from nowhere. they’ll be built on the exhausted, unfinished, often invisible struggles of people who kept moving without guarantees.
that is our duty.
or at least, it’s the only thing i’ve found worth giving my life to.
i think what’s unsettled me most over the years isn’t repression itself. not surveillance, punishment, abandonment. none of those things ever felt surprising. i was incarcerated for fourteen years. i’ve organized. i’ve traveled to palestine. i’ve watched people disappear into systems and watched systems disappear people. cruelty is ordinary here.
what unsettles me is how often people still believe proximity to goodness protects them. how deeply we need to believe there’s a line somewhere. a line between ourselves and the targeted. ourselves and prisoners. ourselves and people under watch. ourselves and those whose lives become evidence.
like if we stay careful enough, useful enough, non-threatening enough… maybe the hand passes over us.
i used to think what the state feared most was militancy. i’m not sure anymore.
your auntie planted tomatoes in the vacant lot on 43rd street and the city sent three notices before they sent the cops. three. notices. for tomatoes. the woman is sixty-three years old, retired, bad knees, got a little sun hat she wears in the morning when she’s out there pulling weeds before the heat gets mean. she’s not throwing molotovs. she’s not agitating. she’s growing food because she lives in a damn food desert and who knows what the government is putting in the food anyways. but the state looked at all of that, at the sun hat and the bad knees and the hungry neighbors, and said: threat.
that’s where u gotta start. not with the militants. not with the people who already know the state is coming for them and built their whole life around that knowledge. start with the auntie. start with the garden. because if u can understand why the garden is a crime, u understand everything else. u understand the whole structure.
the liberal story about resistance goes like this: there’s a line. on one side u got your dangerous radicals, your militants, your people who “go too far,” and those people, well, they kinda asked for it. antifa and shit like that. they knew the risks. made their choices. and on the other side u got your good protesters, your community organizers, your nonviolent peaceful folks working within the system, and those people are safe. those people the state might actually listen to. stay on the right side of the line and the hand won’t come down on u.
come on now.
assata shakur had her hands up. she was sitting in a car on the new jersey turnpike on may 2nd 1973 and the state troopers opened fire before she even had time to think about whether she was on the right side of any line. bullet entered her shoulder, severed her clavicle, exited out her chest, and she was STILL on the ground when they beat her, still on the ground when they denied her medical treatment, still on the ground when they started constructing the story they needed to tell. she was a wanted woman. a known revolutionary. she had been under surveillance for years, followed, wiretapped, infiltrated. and still, STILL the moment they had her body bleeding on the asphalt, the first thing they did was make up a different body, a fictional assata, a woman who had fired first, who had been violent, who had given them no choice. because the real assata, the woman who was actually there, hands up, getting shot, the real assata was too dangerous to admit to. not because of what she did in that moment. because of what she knew. what she had been saying. what she had been building. the story of a woman with her hands up getting shot is a story about the state. and the state needed a different story.
so they gave her one. and then they convicted her on it.
and then, forty years after she escaped, forty YEARS, when she had been living in exile in cuba for decades, when she was a grandmother, when the cold war was technically over and the official story was that all of that, the surveillance, the cointelpro, the political assassinations, all of that was a regrettable chapter in a more innocent time, they put her on the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list. in 2013. with a two million dollar bounty. not because she was an active threat. not because she was organizing from havana. because she was was living proof that u can survive the state’s attempt to disappear u, and the state cannot let that stand. the state needs its disappearances to be permanent. it needs u to believe that once it decides you’re done, you’re done. assata existing, breathing, speaking, that’s the threat. not what she might do. what she already did. what she already survived.
the state has a long memory and no shame and an unlimited budget for vengeance disguised as justice.
think about what the Black Panther Party was doing when j. edgar hoover called them the greatest threat to the internal security of the united states. sit with that. the GREATEST THREAT. to the INTERNAL SECURITY. of the united STATES. and what were they doing? they were giving children breakfast. free breakfast. eggs and toast and orange juice and somebody who looked like them saying: the hunger u went to school with this morning is not natural and not inevitable and not your fault. that’s the threat hoover was talking about. not the guns (though the guns were real and the assertion of the right to bear them was absolutely real and absolutely correct). the threat was the eggs. the threat was free, the threat was the audacity of saying: we can take care of each other without u.
assata knew this. she writes about the people she met in prison, the women in there with her, and she doesn’t describe them as criminals. she describes them as people the system worked exactly as intended on. women who stole because they were hungry, who fought back against men who hurt them and got more time than the men who did the hurting. women who were poor and black and in the wrong place and the state needed somewhere to put them. she looked at those women and saw her neighbors. she saw the same philosophy operating at every scale, in the prison and in the project and in the school and in the precinct, one continuous system with different uniforms at each station. and she loved them. that’s the part people skip over when they talk about assata. the love. she was not operating from pure rage. she was operating from love that had been forced by circumstance into the shape of a weapon. and that is a very different thing from hatred. it’s much harder to neutralize. because u can let rage exhaust itself. u can wait it out. but love that has decided? love that has looked at the people it’s for and said i will not stop? that is ungovernable. that is the thing the state has no instrument for.
and they killed fred hampton in his bed at four in the morning anyway. twenty-one years old. because when u can’t neutralize the love u eliminate the lover. same program and the same philosophy. they just keep changing the names.
here is what the state actually surveils for: relationship. not ideology and not tactics. relationship. who knows who. who is building trust with whom. who is teaching whom. who is feeding whom. who is showing up when somebody else is in trouble. because ideology is manageable, u can discredit it, debate it, wait for people to get tired of it. but relationships are infrastructural. relationship is the thing that makes people do the irrational thing, the thing that is not in their immediate self-interest, the thing that the rational actor theory says they shouldn’t do, which is: stay. which is: not abandon each other. which is: show up anyway.
assata writes about her grandmother. about coming home to her grandmother’s house. about the way her grandmother moved thru the world, dignified and unwilling to be made small, and how that was its own form of instruction. how u learn your relationship to your own life by watching the people who made u live theirs. the grandmother didn’t go to meetings. didn’t write manifestos. but she passed something down thru the specific texture of how she treated people, how she held herself, how she refused certain humiliations, and that something became assata, and assata became ungovernable, and the state has spent fifty years and millions of dollars trying to manage what a grandmother passed down in the ordinary dailiness of how she lived.
that’s what they’re scared of. not the ideology. the transmission. the thing that moves thru kitchens and gardens and sunday mornings and old women with sun hats pulling weeds on 43rd street. the thing u can’t arrest because it’s already in u before u know to be afraid of having it.
so here’s what i need u to understand, and the reflex is gonna be to deflect, to say well that’s different, well i’m not doing anything that serious, well i’m not that kind of activist. the reflex is to create distance between yourself and the person the state has already processed. between yourself and the prisoner. between your struggle and theirs. and that distance feels like safety. it feels like realism. but it damn sure ain’t solidarity.
because assata was on the turnpike with her hands up.
she was not doing the dangerous thing in that moment. she was in a car. and they shot her and beat her and denied her medical treatment and then lied about all of it. and the lesson the state wanted u to take from that was: see what happens when u get involved. see what happens when u pick the wrong side. stay legal. stay far away from the people we’ve already decided to disappear.
but the lesson assata took from it was different. she writes: “it is our duty to fight for our freedom. it is our duty to win. we must love each other and support each other. we have nothing to lose but our chains.” y’all know that one but we should always take a moment to reflect what it really means.
not: be careful. not: know your limits. not: understand that some of us have to accept what the state has decided for us. no. duty. WIN. love each other. that’s the response to a bullet in the shoulder and a frame-up and a prison sentence and a life in exile. not bitterness. not strategy purely. duty and love. the two things the state has no instrument for. the two things that keep moving even when the person carrying them is gone.
and here’s where your auntie comes back. because the state has not built a dossier on her. she doesn’t know assata’s name necessarily, doesn’t think of herself as political, doesn’t think of the vacant lot as contested ground. she just looked at her neighbors and saw hunger and looked at the lot and saw soil and did the thing that made sense to her. and that is EXACTLY the transmission assata is talking about. that is exactly what the grandmother passed down. not ideology. capacity. the capacity to look at managed scarcity and refuse to accept its permanence. to look at the vacant lot and see the garden that’s supposed to be there. show up anyway. feed people.
the state sent three notices and then the cops because it recognized the transmission even when your auntie didn’t. the state knows what that looks like. it’s been trying to stamp it out for centuries. it knows that the woman with the sun hat pulling weeds is doing the same thing, at the root level, that assata was doing on the turnpike and in the courtroom and in the prison and in havana. she is refusing the terms of her own disappearance. she is insisting that her neighbors deserve to eat. she is building something the state did not sanction and did not design and cannot metabolize into profit or control.
she is ungovernable. she just doesn’t know it yet. and the state is there to inform her.
first thing u do with that knowledge: stop performing your innocence. when somebody gets locked up for organizing, for building something the state decided was threatening on a particular tuesday, the move is NOT well they went too far, well i would never, well that’s not my kind of resistance. that is collaboration. u are drawing the line the state needs drawn. u are becoming the guard.
assata writes about the women in prison who had internalized that logic, who had ranked each other by proximity to legitimacy, who had decided that some of what the state did to them was fair, deserved, the natural consequence of choices. and she writes about it with grief, not contempt. because she understood how u get there. u get there by surviving. u get there by needing to believe that your situation has some logic u can work with, some rule u can follow that will keep the worst from happening. u get there because the alternative, understanding that the state’s logic is total and does not have a rule u can follow to get safe, that alternative is terrifying. it requires u to abandon the fantasy of innocence entirely. to accept that u were never going to be allowed to be innocent. that innocence was not on the menu. that the menu only has one item and it is: managed or unmanaged. processed or not yet processed.
and the only way forward from that understanding is toward each other. which is what assata said. duty. win. love each other. not a plan. a direction.
your auntie is still out there on 43rd, bad knees and sun hat, in the early morning before the heat gets unbearable. she’s thinking about the tomatoes. about who she’s gonna bring the extra to when they come in. she’s thinking about her neighbors.
assata was in havana, a grandmother, still on the list, still ungovernable, still alive, which was itself a form of resistance the state had spent fifty years trying to answer.
and what connects them, what runs between the vacant lot and the island, between the sun hat and the exile, between the garden and the turnpike, is the same thing that ran thru the grandmother’s kitchen and the free breakfast line and the prison yard. the insistence. the love that has been forced by circumstance into the shape of a practice. the understanding, conscious or not, that the vacant lot was never supposed to be vacant. that the hunger was never supposed to be permanent, and that the state’s version of your block and your body and your future is not the only version. that u can look at the same emptiness the state designed for u and see something else entirely.
seeing is the crime. that’s always been the crime.
the question is whether u know what you’re already guilty of. the question is whether u understand that the file exists whether or not you’ve read it. the question is whether u find out the way assata found out, on the turnpike with your hands up, or whether u already know, right now, what game is being played and decide, consciously, deliberately, with full understanding of what it costs.
.
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.
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shout out to the militant gardeners, fighting the enemy by feeding the people.
also, fuck 12.
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