Assata Taught Me: Our Struggle Is Beautiful

i want to be real. Am i the only bad-doing, hand-to-mouth, barely-making-it Black woman there. The struggle i’ve been going through and the struggle i’ve been seeing is too hard to lie about and i don’t even want to try. I want to help free the ghetto, not run away from it, leaving my people behind. i don’t want to style and profile in front of nobody. i want somebody i can relate to and talk about serious shit with.

Assata Shakur p.154

Assata’s words have been sitting on my heart heavy this entire month of September. A month that brought all that life can throw at you: joy, pain, frustration, pride, anger, and so much more. What September really showed me was what and who I wanted to be. For context, our team at Neighbor Program read Assata for Black August and as I reread her words, I kept finding myself within her pages. The more and more I could see myself in her pages the more and more grounded I found myself. Assata’s words remind us that our greatest champions and heroes aren’t determined by status, wealth, popularity, or even this world. As I was told recently, “energy never dies, it just transforms”; so the real will always be relevant, and that is what to hold in esteem.

In a society driven by social media, someone’s public image is their money-making brand. So naturally we see an increase in individualism because it is tied to one’s ability to create income and therefore sustain themselves within the kkkapitslist framework we currently operate in. But Assata’s brutal honesty…