Black August note #1
Black Studies is the rupture that has the potential to destabilize all subjective and objective modes of reason. As Jared Sexton has argued, “all researches, insofar as they are genuinely critical inquiries, aspire to black studies. Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.” Given the emergence of the field out of the 1960s Black student struggles at San Francisco State University, and later at the University of California, Berkeley, Black Studies is an expressively political project. Its politicality is bound by the conditions of its emergence, and the power it holds to pose the question, “What is the status of the Black in the world?” (89)
With Assata, the reader is confronted with the contradictions of experiencing empathy for Shakur as a Black woman subjected to unfathomable brutality, and reckoning with how the coordinates of gender are undone in the case of Blackness. Saidiya Hartman argues that, “ the captive female does not possess gender as much as she is possessed by gender—that is, by way of particular investments in and use of the body.” (91)
In this respect, Assata exposes an array of violence that seems shocking if one positions her gender as the first frame of thought, but is quite commonplace if slavery is positioned as the locus that makes the conditions of her captivity possible. (91)
In this article, I will explore this question by considering how Black gender is animated in Assata and by the ongoing United States government efforts to capture Shakur, who continues to live in exile in Cuba. Rather than assessing the totality of Shakur’s life and legacy, this article mediates on how various moments in Assata challenge the reader to consider the availability of gender as a performative and identificatory structure for the Black. Furthermore, the arguments laid forth here grapple with the following: What is to be done about the fact that Shakur is still not free? This question must bear the symbolic weight of the war waged against Black liberation struggles, from the realm of police action to the terrain of the psyche. (92)
Gendered specificity and integrity are lost for the Black. (94)
Although she and others may use pronouns gendered female to describe her condition, the particularities of Blackness circumscribe how those pronouns can be employed to make sense of her experiences. What is assumed as a profound misgendering of Shakur as an individual, when placed in conversation with the conditions of all Black people – as she intends for the book to be read – demonstrates that this misgendering is not unique to Black women, but a condition of Black gender, writ large. (95)
Shakur was beaten ruthlessly by police officers and prison guards, was strip and cavity searched, was confined in an ant and centipede-infested basement in a men’s prison, was held for months at a time in solitary confinement, was starved and subjected to intense medical neglect which almost resulted in the loss of her pregnancy, and had her baby stripped from her soon after birthing. These are instances of an (un)gendered Blackness. (96)
Antiblack hostility, which is a priori (un)gendered, was the framing tone of Shakur’s life and what called her to join the [Black Liberation Army.] (96)
The irreconcibility of antiblack violence, gendered and otherwise, which extends beyond legalized enslavement into the present, presents a haunting. (100)
– Patrice D. Douglass. “Assata is Here: (Dis)Locating Gender in Black Studies.” Souls, 22:1 (2020), 89-103.
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera joined with Black and brown trans and queer folks in New York in the 1970s to create the Street Trans Action Revolutionaries.
STAR was a collective that provided housing and resources for trans and queer young people and advocated for self-determination and free housing, food, education, health care, and more, particularly for TLGBQIA+ people who are poor or incarcerated. They rallied against state violence, criminalization, incarceration, and capitalism.
– DC Survivor Support, “Revisiting the STAR Manifesto”
Because of this oppression the majority of trans people* are forced into the street and we have formed a strong alliance with our gay sisters and brothers of the street. Who we are a part of and represent we are; a part of the REVOLUTIONARIES armies fighting against the system. [. . .]
No. 9: We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where trans people, street people, women, homosexuals, puerto ricans, indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the earth and kills us off like flies, one by one, and throws us into jail to rot. This government who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon, and lets the poor Americans starve to death.
– S.T.A.R. Manifesto, 1970
Chris Thompson: Chris was a dancer, and aspired to be a dance therapist. Chris was also black, gay, trans and asthmatic. She sought treatment for asthma at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in 1970, but was locked in the psychiatric wing. She was ridiculed by the staff for sexual and gender deviance, and was threatened with transfer to the state mental hospital, but was quite accepted by the other patients. Arthur Bell & Sylvia Rivera discovered her and were able to do an interview. “When I came into admitting office, I told the doctor I had congestion and asthma. Because of me wanting to be a woman so much, he asked me did I ever have a fear of cutting my penis off. I didn’t tell him one way or the other, but on my record they have it down that I have a fear of cutting my penis off, to become a woman. I want to become a woman that bad, so they asked me these questions — do I still have a fear of taking a razor and cutting my penis off and I told them no, and if I did decide to have a sex change I would go through the legal procedures and go to the proper physicians and have it done.”
– Zagria, Other trans persons in New York 1969-72
Black trans safety means we move like mycorrhizae and struggle on the ground or under-ground to get resources around so we can meet our material needs. This is how we can lessen the likelihood that our struggling communities even have to interact with either the police or bigots in the first place. It means we think of in terms of political education, jail support, bailouts, and advocacy so we can raise our awareness of and stand with our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Black trans siblings who often get overlooked. Black trans safety means we also consider and strategize around what it means to arm or train both ourselves and one another for self defense. It means developing safe houses and escape routes and creating liberated spaces for ourselves. When we say defense, we mean creating independent medicine, food, education, arms, and mental health infrastructure to sustain and nurture and protect ourselves, by us, for us.
All of this has been said before. And all the community defense models I mentioned are already being built, too. So, a statement on defense is not about reinventing the wheel, but is about inviting us to more deeply and more seriously consolidate what has already been created at the“ bottom of the lowerarchy,” (as Assata called it) — to advance it to a more solid and conscientiously revolutionary state. The goal is to ensure that the resistance can become tougher than the bricks that our mothers threw at the cops on that day [the Stonewall Riots]. The goal is to make sure were mind ourselves and explore more deeply what it takes to be the wild things Man caint house...
– K.D. Wilson, “Transphobia is a Respectability Politic: Thoughts on Black Community Defense”
“. . . . but it really doesn’t matter if y’ain’t got soul.”
– Marsha P. Johnson