“The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is a normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware that you are a slave.” Assata Shakur
By the time Assata was a teenager, she had witnessed live television scenes of white mobs attacking peaceful demonstrations, Black people being attacked by vicious dogs, and being beaten by cops. It was during this time that Assata began to absorb and read about the atrocities of slavery and how the psychological impact of such a grim period has maintained its endurance within each generation.
Assata began to link the self-destructive behavior of Black people directly back to the plantation when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on each other instead of the master. Assata would write that “the slave masters taught us that we were ugly, less hue-man and many of us believed it.”
By the time Assata was 17, she had relocated back to New York and continued to evolve. While she was attending night school, she began to interact with Black people who would help raise her consciousness to higher levels. Assata began to learn from and interact with sisters and brothers who were aware of worldly events that affected Black people.
She was very disturbed about the Black people who bragged about materialistic lifestyles. Black people who talked about expensive cars, high-end clothing lines, moving to the suburbs, eating at expensive restaurants, and sniffing cocaine turned Assata completely off.
The same backward lifestyle that Assata separated herself from over 50 years ago is prevalent within the bastardized culture that we have adopted today.
Assata also had a huge problem with Black magazines, particularly Ebony and Jet of Johnson publications. These magazines promoted an over-glamorized American theme, especially through the images of the fashions and lifestyles of Africans in America.
Ironically, if you flip through the pages of Ebony today, you will notice very little change in the continuous promotion of the colonizer’s culture. Every other page is filled with highlights of white values, European traditions, and overt loyalty to white-owned businesses and institutions.
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