Although racist state
violence has been a consistent theme in the history of people of African
descent in North America, it has become especially noteworthy during the
administration of the first African-American president, whose very election was
widely interpreted as heralding the advent of a new, postracial era.
The sheer persistence of
police killings of black youth contradicts the assumption that these are
isolated aberrations. Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, are only the most widely known of the countless numbers of black
people killed by police or vigilantes during the Obama administration. And
they, in turn, represent an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official
and extra-legal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan, to contemporary
profiling practices and present-day vigilantes.
More than three decades
ago Assata Shakur was granted political asylum by Cuba, where she has since
lived, studied and worked as a productive member of society. Assata was falsely
charged on numerous occasions in the United States during the early 1970s and
vilified by the media. It represented her in sexist terms as “the mother hen”
of the Black Liberation Army, which in turn was portrayed as a group with
insatiably violent proclivities. Placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, she
was charged with armed robbery, bank robbery, kidnap, murder, and attempted
murder of a policeman. Although she faced 10 separate legal proceedings, and
had already been pronounced guilty by the media, all except one of these trials
– the case resulting from her capture – concluded in acquittal, hung jury, or
dismissal. Under highly questionable circumstances, she was finally convicted
of being an accomplice to the murder of a New Jersey state trooper.
Four decades after the
original campaign against her, the FBI decided to demonise her once more. Last
year, on the 40th anniversary of the New Jersey turnpike shoot-out during which
state trooper Werner Foerster was killed, Assata was ceremoniously added to the
FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Terrorist list. To many, this move by the FBI was bizarre
and incomprehensible, leading to the obvious question: what interest would the
FBI have in designating a 66-year-old black woman, who has lived quietly in
Cuba for the last three and a half decades, as one of the most dangerous
terrorists in the world – sharing space on the list with individuals whose
alleged actions have provoked military assaults on Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria?
A partial – perhaps even
determining – answer to this question may be discovered in the broadening of
the reach of the definition of “terror”, spatially as well as temporally.
Following the apartheid South African government’s designation of Nelson
Mandela and the African National Congress as “terrorists”, the term was
abundantly applied to US black liberation activists during the late 1960s and
early 70s.
President Nixon’s law and
order rhetoric entailed the labelling of groups such as the Black Panther party
as terrorist, and I myself was similarly identified. But it was not until
George W Bush proclaimed a global war on terror in the aftermath of 11
September 2001 that terrorists came to represent the universal enemy of western
“democracy”. To retroactively implicate Assata Shakur in a putative
contemporary terrorist conspiracy is also to bring those who have inherited her
legacy, and who identify with continued struggles against racism and
capitalism, under the canopy of “terrorist violence”. Moreover, the historical
anti-communism directed at Cuba, where Assata lives, has been dangerously
articulated with anti-terrorism. The case of the Cuban 5 is a prime example of
this.
This use of the war on
terror as a broad designation of the project of 21st-century western democracy
has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimised
the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of
immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarisation of local police
departments throughout the country. Police departments – including on college
and university campuses – have acquired military surplus from the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan through the Department of Defense Excess Property Program.
Thus, in response to the recent police killing of Michael Brown, demonstrators
challenging racist police violence were confronted by police officers dressed
in camouflage uniforms, armed with military weapons, and driving armoured
vehicles.
