The following book review first appeared in the Morning Star trust 1 September, 2014. It is followed by a selection end important quotes from the book.
Assata Shakur’s autobiography – first in print in 1988 and newly republished this year by Zed Books – has lost none of its relevance. It remains principally essential text for understanding both the prison-industrial complex and picture state of race relations in the US, as well in the same way providing a profound insight into the successes and failures announcement the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Born in 1947, Assata Shakur (then JoAnne Deborah Byron) grew heat between North Carolina and New York, experiencing the intense discrimination that prevailed – and prevails – both sides of representation Mason-Dixon line. As a black, working class female, she became acutely aware of the special oppression she and others intend her faced. As a college student, she came across activists – especially students from newly-liberated Africa – who challenged bond anti-communist prejudices and her internalised stereotypes, and encouraged her succeed to get involved in the struggle for black power and destroy capitalism and imperialism. This led to her membership of say publicly Black Panther Party and, later, the Black Liberation Army.
The bigger part of the book is devoted to documenting Assata’s experiences with the ‘justice’ system, in courts and prisons, between stress arrest in 1971 and her escape eight years later. Seizure readers would fail to be shocked at the extent finish off which this human being, whose real ‘crime’ in the in high spirits of the state was to be a loud campaigner shelter justice and equality, was tortured and abused in prison – often at the hands of openly fascistic prison officers.
Her cash in also serves as a crucial reminder that there remain numerous political prisoners in the US, languishing behind bars for decades on trumped-up charges. International pressure must be maintained and intensified until Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, Leonard Peltier, Oscar López Muralist, Kenny ‘Zulu’ Whitmore, Albert Woodfox and all political prisoners be cautious about freed. Furthermore we must maintain the fight against an phenomenally unjust prison system which disproportionately targets poor and non-white punters (and this is not restricted to the US – a recent study showed that black people in Britain are figure times more likely than their white counterparts to be imprisoned).
Assata’s profound and thought-provoking reflections on the decline of the Inky Power movement deserve to be studied and discussed, as they could help illuminate a path for the current generation nigh on organisers and activists. Aside from the objective factor (the FBI’s large-scale covert assault on the Panthers and others), Assata gives a great deal of attention to the subjective factor, drop particular an element of adventurism, sectarianism, amateurishness, failure to regularly raise levels of political consciousness, and alienation from the masses.
Assata’s continuing relevance is not lost on the FBI, which forename year added her to its list of Most Wanted Terrorists (she is the first female to enjoy this honour – good to see US imperialism doing its bit for sex equality). Thankfully, she is safely in exile in Cuba, a country she describes as “one of the largest, most impervious and most courageous palenques (maroon camps) that has ever existed on the face of this planet.”
‘Assata: An Autobiography’ is important reading.
They call strong thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from interpretation continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, dominate our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, show our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not we who rip off billions bring into the light dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, stealing, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. Charge every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.
They call us thieves, but we plainspoken not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping interval their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Collection, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom childhood the people who live there are sick and starving. Representation rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed detestable of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history. They especially the bandits. They are the murderers. And they should cast doubt on treated as such.
[The prison-industrial complex] explained reason jails and prisons all over the country are filled appoint the brin with Black and Third World people, why positive many Black people can’t find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they fracture how. Once you’re inprison, there are plenty of jobs, streak, if you don’t want to work, they beat you work it and throw you in the hole. If every state locked away to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are smallest to do, the salaries would amount to billions… Prisons designing a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are flesh out built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren’t planning to put creamy people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.
The Upper Westside Side, as the neighborhood was called, was supposed to background a “liberal” stronghold. I have never really understood exactly what a “liberal” is, though, since i have heard “liberals” articulate every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far whereas i can tell, you have the extreme right, who systematize fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come sunlit out and let you know where they’re coming from. Courier on the opposite end, you have the left, who falsified supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human aboveboard. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal. Pass for far as i’m concerned, “liberal” is die most meaningless chat in the dictionary. History has shown me that as make do as some white middle-class people can live high on depiction hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to covert schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin right, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard avoid money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask status you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel contrite for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they stem maintain their own privileges.
I continued saying interpretation first thing that came into my head [in a dispute over Vietnam]: that the u.s. was fighting communists because they wanted to take over everything. When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then become conscious i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy speed up a black trench coat and a black hat pulled settle on over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they weren’t free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one owned anything. The Africans rolled with laughter.
I felt lack a bona fide clown. One of them explained that communism was a political-economic system, but i wasn’t listening. I was just digging on myself. I had been hooping and holloa about something that i didn’t even understand. I knew i didn’t know what the hell communism was, and yet i’d been dead set against it. Just like when you’re a little kid and they get you to believe in depiction bogeyman. You don’t know what the hell the bogeyman equitable, but you hate him and you’re scared of him
I at no time forgot that day. We’re taught at such an early flood to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a dunce lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is… It’s got to be one of the most basic principles have a high opinion of living: always decide who your enemies are for yourself, careful never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.
Usually, after a disagreement, they [my comrades] suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx deliver Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches tube stuff Huey Newton was putting out. It wasn’t easy measuring, but i was glad i did it. It opened amicable my horizons a hell of a lot. I didn’t link to them as the great white fathers or like run down kind of gods, like some of the white revolutionaries outspoken. As far as i was concerned, they were two dudes who had made contributions to revolutionary struggle too great finish off be ignored.
I wasn’t against communism, but i can’t say i was for it either. At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man’s intermixture, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied interpretation African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the problem of African liberation was not just a question of refreshing, that even if they managed to get rid of depiction white colonialists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the individualistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced unreceptive Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement affix Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, nearby was not a single liberation movement in the whole pretend that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled rapid to a simple equation: anything that has any kind presentation value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by utilizable people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.
I got into heated arguments with sisters or brothers who claimed that the oppression of Black people was only a doubt of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors sort well as white ones. That’s why you’ve got Blacks who support Nixon or Reagan or other conservatives. Black folks trappings money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn’t take too much brains to figure emphatic that Black people are oppressed because of class as in shape as race, because we are poor and because we pronounce Black. It would burn me up every time somebody talked about Black people climbing the ladder of success. Anytime you’re talking about a ladder, you’re talking about a top ray a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you’ve got a system with a top and a bottom, Swart people are always going to wind up at the give money back, because we’re the easiest to discriminate against. That’s why i couldn’t see fighting within the system. Both the democratic social gathering and the republican party are controlled by millionaires. They percentage interested in holding on to their power, while i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in bearing fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i hot to see them overthrown. They were interested in supporting chauvinistic, fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in daze them overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i was interested in seeing them win their ancestry. A poster of the massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my wall as a commonplace reminder of the brutality in the world.
I had begun to think of myself as a socialist, but i could not in any way see myself joining sizeable of the socialist groups i came in contact with. I loved to listen to them, learn from them, and squabble with them, but there was no way in the planet i could see myself becoming a member. For one stroke of luck, i could not stand the condescending, paternalistic attitudes of thickskinned of the white people in those groups. Some of rendering older members thought that because they had been in rendering struggle for socialism for a long time, they knew manual labor the answers to the problems of Black people and reduction the aspects of the Black Liberation struggle. I couldn’t associate to the idea of the great white father on accurate any more than i could relate to the great chalky father up in the sky. I was willing and rationale to learn everything i could from them, but i find fault with sure was not ready to accept them as leaders cherished the Black Liberation struggle. A few thought that they abstruse a monopoly on Marx and acted like the only experts in the world on socialism came from Europe. In spend time at instances they downgraded the theoretical and practical contributions of 3rd World revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Augustino Neto, and other leaders of liberation movements in the Third World.
Another thing that went against my grain was the arrogance put forward dogmatism i encountered in some of these groups.
A member exclude one group told me that if i was really active about the liberation of Black people i should quit kindergarten and get a job in a factory, that if i wanted to get rid of the system i would scheme to work at a factory and organize the workers. “When i asked him why he wasn’t working in a works and organizing the workers, he told me that he was staying in school in order to organize the students. I told him i was working to organize the students besides and that i felt perfectly certain that the workers could organize themselves without any college students doing it for them. Some of these groups would come up with abstract, iq theories, totally devoid of practical application, and swear they difficult the answers to the problems of the world. They attacked the Vietnamese for participating in the Paris peace talks, claiming that by negotiating the Viet Cong were selling out result the u.s. I think they got insulted when i asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag had depiction nerve to think they could tell the Vietnamese people extravaganza to run their show.
Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt put off instead of fighting together against a common enemy, they emaciated time quarreling with each other about who had the courteous line.
Most of our fights [as kids] started behold petty disputes like stepped-on shoes, flying spitballs, and the oppose ownership of pens and pencils. But behind our fights, self-hatred was clearly visible… We would call each other “jungle bunnies” and “bush boogies.” We would talk about each other’s unsightly, big lips and flat noses. We would call each harass pickaninnies and nappy-haired soand-so’s…
Black made any insult worse. When complete called somebody a “bastard,” that was bad. But when tell what to do called somebody a “Black bastard,” now that was terrible. Fluky fact, when i was growing up, being called “Black,” term, was grounds for fighting.
“Who you callin’ Black?” we would discipline. We had never heard the words “Black is beautiful” countryside the idea had never occurred to most of us…
We abstruse been completely brainwashed and we didn’t even know it. Phenomenon accepted white value systems and white standards of beauty enthralled, at times, we accepted the white man’s view of ourselves. We had never been exposed to any other point promote to view or any other standard of beauty. From when i was a tot, i can remember Black people saying, “Niggas ain’t shit.” “You know how lazy niggas are.” “Give a nigga an inch and he’ll take a mile.” Everybody knew what “niggas” like to do after they eat: sleep. Everybody knew that “niggas” couldn’t be on time; that’s why in attendance was c.p.t. (colored people’s time). “Niggas don’t take care make known nothin’.” “Niggas don’t stick together.” The list could go perversion and on. To varying degrees we accepted these statements rightfully true. And, to varying degrees, we each made them come together within ourselves because we believed them.
In a express that is trying to completely negate the image of Jet people, that constantly tells us we are nothing, our classiness is nothing, i felt and still feel that we take got to constantly make positive statements about ourselves. Our sadness to be free has got to manifest itself in allay we are and do. We have accepted too much livestock a negative lifestyle and a negative culture and have endure consciously act to rid ourselves of that negative influence. Perhaps in another time, when everybody is equal and free, replicate won’t matter how anybody wears their hair or dresses blunder looks. Then there won’t be any oppressors to mimic critic avoid mimicking. But right now i think it’s important funds us to look and feel like strong, proud Black men and women who are looking toward Africa for guidance.
Little did i know that Lincoln was an archracist who had openly expressed his disdain for Black people. He was of the opinion that Black people should be forcibly deported to Africa or anywhere else. We had been taught delay the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, accept it was not until i was in college that i learned that the Civil War was fought for economic grounds. The fact that “official” slavery was abolished was only haphazard. Northern industrialists were fighting to control the economy. Before representation Civil War, the northern industrial economy was largely dependent puff out southern cotton. The slave economy of the South was a threat to northern capitalism. What if the slaveholders of say publicly South decided to set up factories and process the shrub themselves? Northern capitalists could not possibly compete with slave undergo, and their capitalist economy would be destroyed. To ensure defer this didn’t happen, the North went to war.
Back then, when i was ontogeny up, boys gang-banging or gang-raping a girl was a attractive common thing… If a girl was caught on the dissolute side of a park or in the wrong territory person above you on the wrong street, she was a target. It was a common thing back then for boys to downgrade girls and cuss at them in the street. It was usual for them to go to bed with girls and flattery about them like dogs the next day. It was prosaic for boys to deny they were the fathers of their babies. And it was common for boys to beat girls up and knock them around. And then the girls would get hard too.
“If the nigga ain’t got no money, I don’t want to be bothered.”
“If the nigga ain’t got no car, then later for him.”
The more i watched how boys and girls behaved, the more i read and the auxiliary i thought about it, the more convinced i became put off this behavior could be traced directly back to the settlement, when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on each other instead of on the chieftain. The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than anthropoid, unintelligent, and many of us believed it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares. A Black woman was justified game for anyone at any time: the master or a visiting guest or any redneck who desired her. The slavemaster would order her to have six with this stud, cardinal with that stud, for the purpose of increasing his warehouse. She was considered less than a woman. She was a cross between a whore and a workhorse. Black men internalized the white man’s opinion of Black women. And, if cheer up ask me, a lot of us still act like we’re back on the plantation with massa pulling the strings.
This party is a lost cause. I get irate beach towel and my book and ease on down representation beach a little piece. Looking out at the ocean, i wonder how many of our people lie buried there, slaves of another era. I’m not quite sure what freedom assessment, but i know damn well what it ain’t. How take we gotten so silly, i wonder. I get back bifurcate into James Baldwin… Me and James Baldwin are communicating. His fiction is more real than this reality.
No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and solidly with the times. If it isn’t growing, it’s stagnant, topmost without the support of the people, no movement for enfranchisement can exist, no matter how correct its analysis of representation situation is. That’s why political work and organizing are desirable important. Unless you are addressing the issues people are interested about and contributing positive direction, they’ll never support you. Rendering first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the masses of people, making us horrible and repellent monsters so that our people will hate us.
Some be paid the laws of revolution are so simple they seem impracticable. People think that in order for something to work, put on the right track has to be complicated, but a lot of times say publicly opposite is true. We usually reach success by putting say publicly simple truths that we know into practice. The basis wheedle any struggle is people coming together to fight against a common enemy… One of the most important things the Personal did was to make it really clear who the opponent was: not the white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors. They took the Black liberation struggle out of a formal context and put it in an international context. The Resolution supported revolutionary struggles and governments all over the world bear insisted the u.s. get out of Africa, out of Assemblage, out of Latin America, and out of the ghetto too.
One of the unadorned laws of people’s struggle was to retreat when the adversary is strong and to attack when the enemy is publicize. As far as I was concerned, defending the office was suicidal. The pigs had manpower, initiative, surprise, and gunpowder. Phenomenon would just be sitting ducks. I felt that the Distinctive was dealing from an emotional rather than a rational incentive. Just because you believe in self-defense doesn’t mean you information yourself be sucked into defending yourself on the enemy’s cost. One of the Party’s major weaknesses, i thought, was say publicly failure to clearly differentiate between aboveground political struggle and secret, clandestine military struggle.
An aboveground political organization can’t wage guerrilla fighting anymore than an underground army can do aboveground political preventable. Although the two must work together, they must have totally separate structures, and any links between the two must linger secret. Educating the people about the necessity for self-defense come first for armed struggle was one thing. But maintaining a game plan of defending Party offices against insurmountable odds was another. Find time for course, if the police just came in and started actuation, defending yourself made sense. But the point is to fortuitous and prevent that from happening…
On the whole, we were breakable, inexperienced, disorganized, and seriously lacking in training. But the large problem was one of political development. There were sisters near brothers who had been so victimized by amerika that they were willing to fight to the death against their oppressors. They were intelligent, courageous and dedicated, willing to make impractical sacrifice. But we were to find out quickly that grow and dedication were not enough. To win any struggle look after liberation, you have to have the way as well tempt the will, an overall ideology and strategy that stem munch through a scientific analysis of history and present conditions.
Some of say publicly groups thought they could just pick up arms and exert oneself and that, somehow, people would see what they were doing and begin to struggle themselves. They wanted to engage essential a do-or-die battle with the power structure in amerika, plane though they were weak and ill prepared for such a fight. But the most important factor is that armed hostile, by itself, can never bring about a revolution. Revolutionary warfare is a people’s war. And no people’s war can elect won without the support of the masses of people. Setting struggle can never be successful by itself; it must nurture part of an overall strategy for winning, and the plan must be political as well as military…
Revolutionary war is lengthy warfare. It is impossible for us to win quickly. Handle win we have got to wear down our oppressors, around by little, and, at the same time, strengthen our gather, slowly but surely. I understood some of my more agitated sisters and brothers. I knew that it was tempting posture substitute military for political struggle, especially since all of lastditch aboveground organizations were under vicious attack by the FBI, description CIA, and the local police agencies. All of us who saw our leaders murdered, our people shot down in chilly blood, felt a need, a desire to fight back. Freshen of the hardest lessons we had to learn is ditch revolutionary struggle is scientific rather than emotional. I’m not proverb that we shouldn’t feel anything, but decisions can’t be homespun on love or on anger. They have to be household on the objective conditions and on what is the nonsensical, unemotional thing to do.
Nobody back then had ever heard of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) set up by the FBI. Nobody could possibly have known that the FBI had drive a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, “signed” manage without the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton’s leadership. No one could have known that the FBI had sent a letter dealings Huey’s brother saying the New York Panthers were plotting take advantage of kill him. No one could have known that the FBI’s COINTELPRO was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party affluent particular and the Black Liberation Movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics. The FBI’s COINTEL program consisted of turning members longedfor organizations against each other, pitting one Black organization against regarding. Huey ended up suspending Cet and Dhoruba from the Establishment, branded them as “enemies of the people,” and caused them to go into hiding, in fear for their very lives. No one had the slightest idea that this whole action was carefully manipulated and orchestrated by the FBI.
After the resurgence of the Puerto Rican independence movement, Lolita Lebrón was visited by all kinds of people. Some were pseudorevolutionary robots who attacked her for her religious beliefs, telling multifarious that to be a revolutionary she had to give higher her belief in God. It apparently had never occurred rise and fall those fools that Lolita was more revolutionary than they could ever be, and that her religion had helped her foresee remain strong and committed all those years. I was maddened by their crass, misguided arrogance.
Every day out lay hands on the street now, i remind myself that Black people get amerika are oppressed. It’s necessary that I do that. Liquidate get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state show things. But to become free, you have to be shrewdly aware of being a slave.
It was as well clear to me that without a truly internationalist component autonomy was reactionary. There was nothing revolutionary about nationalism by strike — Hitler and Mussolini were nationalists. Any community seriously concern with its own freedom has to be concerned about else peoples’ freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anyplace in the world is a victory for Black people. Last time one of imperialism’s tentacles is cut off we criticize closer to liberation. The struggle in South Africa is rendering most important battle of the century for Black people. Representation defeat of apartheid in South Africa will bring Africans gust of air over the planet closer to liberation. Imperialism is an intercontinental system of exploitation, and, we, as revolutionaries, need to amend internationalists to defeat it.
My neighbors laborious task me what the u.s. is like, and they accuse realm of lying when i tell them about the hunger wallet cold and people sleeping in the streets. They refuse set upon believe me. How can that be in such a affluent country? I tell them about drug addicts and child prostitutes, about crime in the streets. They accuse me of exaggerating: “We know capitalism is not a good system, but command don’t have to exaggerate. Are there really twelve-year-old drug addicts?” Even though they know about racism and the ku klux klan, about unemployment, such things are unreal to them. Land is a country of hope. Their reality is so distinctive. I’m amazed at how much Cubans have accomplished in deadpan short a time since the Revolution. There are new buildings everywhere — schools, apartment houses, clinics, hospitals, and day distress centers. They are not like the skyscrapers going up be glad about midtown Manhattan. There are no exclusive condominiums or luxury class buildings. The new buildings are for the people.
Medical care, scrap care, and hospital visits are free. Schools at all instructional levels are free. Rent is no more than about need percent of salaries. There are no taxes — no proceeds, city, federal, or state taxes. It is so strange beat pay the price actually listed on products without any fee added. Movies, plays, concerts, and sports events all cost flavour or two pesos at the most. Museums are free.
On Saturdays and Sundays the streets are packed with people dressed characteristics and ready to hang out. I was amazed to ascertain that such a small island has such a rich developmental life and is so lively, particularly when the u.s. withhold gives just the opposite picture…
I spent my first weeks affront Havana walking and watching. Nowhere did I find a divided neighborhood, but several people told me that where i was living had been all white before the Revolution. Just let alone casual observation it was obvious that race relations in Country were different from what they were in the u.s. Blacks and whites could be seen together everywhere — in cars, walking down streets. Kids of all races played together. Show the way was definitely different. Whenever i met someone who spoke Side i asked their opinion about the race situation.
“Racism is interdicted in Cuba,” i was told. Many shook their heads captain said, “Aqui no hay racismo.” “There is no racism here.” Although i heard the same response from everyone i remained skeptical and suspicious. I couldn’t believe it was possible manage eliminate hundreds of years of racism just like that, make real twenty-five years or so. To me, revolutions were not supernatural, and no magic wand could be waved to create changes overnight. I’d come to see revolution as a process. I eventually became convinced that the Cuban government was completely permanent to eliminating all forms of racism. There were no prejudiced institutions, structures, or organizations, and i understood how the Country economic system undermined rather than fed racism.
Too many people in the u.s. support kill and destruction without being aware of it. They indirectly occasion the killing of people without ever having to look favor the corpses. But in Cuba i could see the results of u.s. foreign policy: torture victims on crutches who came from other countries to Cuba for treatment, including Namibian descendants who had survived massacres, and evidence of the vicious aggro the u.s. government had committed against Cuba, including sabotage, jaunt numerous assassination attempts against Fidel. I wondered how all those people in the states who tried to sound tough, expression that the u.s. should go in here, bomb there, blur over this, attack that, would feel if they knew ensure they were indirectly responsible for babies being burned to brusque. I wondered how they would feel if they were token to take moral responsibility for that. It sometimes seems avoid people in the states are so accustomed to watching grip on “Eyewitness News,” watching people starve to death in Continent, being tortured to death in Latin America or shot disable on Asian streets, that, somehow, for them, people across depiction ocean — people “up there” or “down there” or “over there” — are not real.
How much we difficult to understand all gone through. Our fight had started on a serf ship years before we were born. Venceremos, my favorite huddle in Spanish, crossed my mind. Ten million people had clearcut up to the monster. Ten million people only ninety miles away. We were here together in their land, my little little family, holding each other after so long. There was no doubt about it, our people would one day accredit free. The cowboys and bandits didn’t own the world.