With Senator Barack Obama having become the United States’ first black presidential candidate from one of the two dominant parties, it is useful to look back at the 1960s, a decade when the nation’s racial divides seemed insurmountable. In Obama’s life story, one of racial hybridity and good old “up by your boot straps” determination, many in North America have found a charismatic symbol of racial reconciliation, a signal that the civil rights era is finally, truly behind us.
 Assata aka Joanne Chesimard (DVD, 2008), a film by Fred Baker, 93 minutes, www.filmsbyfredbaker.com |
But is it? What Obama’s exceptional life story obscures is the fact that the path he took to success is closed off to most black people, particularly those raised by a single mother in modest circumstances. The inconvenient truth is that millions of black people still attend segregated schools and live in segregated neighborhoods, still find themselves unemployed, still disproportionately face police brutality and incarceration. In that context, racial inequality is likely to persist no matter who answers the White House phone at 3 a.m. on January 21, 2009. And so now more than ever, we might want to assess the civil rights agenda and the people who fought for it in a clear-eyed, analytical way, lest we lose sight of the fact that the agenda for which so many suffered and died remains largely unfulfilled.
Fred Baker’s Assata aka JoAnne Chesimard would seem to provide one occasion for such reflection. Its subject is both inspiring and controversial, a cautionary tale about the lengths to which the U.S. state was willing to go in quashing black radicals and a reminder of just how high the stakes really were. In 1973 Shakur—a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army (BLA)—was involved in a shoot-out in which New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster and BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur were killed. During her subsequent trials, much of the evidence pointed to Shakur’s innocence. Forensic and medical experts testified that Shakur’s injuries could only have been sustained while holding her arms up in surrender rather than while firing a gun; no gunpowder residue was ever found on Shakur’s body; and a key witness against her later recanted his testimony. Nonetheless, an all-white jury convicted Shakur, and she was ordered to serve consecutive life sentences. In 1979, she escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey and lived underground for several years before escaping in 1984 to Cuba, where she still lives as a political exile. In short, Baker’s subject matter has all the elements needed for a compelling docudrama, yet the film falls short of even the most modest expectations.
Baker frames Shakur’s story with a contrived and unconvincing narrative about filmmaker Justin (Charles Everett) and journalism student Asha (Erika Vaughn), who meet at a New York street festival. Within hours, they sleep together, fall in love, and agree to collaborate on Justin’s film about Shakur. Soon, however, their research threatens to tear them apart as Justin, a longtime researcher of the Shakur case, underscores the dangers inherent in digging further, while Asha is drawn deeper and deeper into the project, so much so that she travels to Cuba with the hope of meeting the elusive exile.
While this narrative frame allows Baker to juxtapose newspaper accounts, archival footage, dramatic reenactments, contemporary interviews, and rallies and protests in support of Shakur, it is too weak and the acting too unconvincing to sustain much interest. Ultimately, one doesn’t care what happens to Justin and Asha, who seem like cardboard cutouts: Asha is impatient where Justin is wise; she is naive and uninhibited where he is experienced and chastened. Aside from the clichéd and problematic gender politics of this dichotomy, the poor acting and thin script threaten to obscure Baker’s larger point, which is that the state’s efforts to frame and incarcerate Shakur and other black radicals find their contemporary echoes in today’s War on Terror. Justin explicitly makes this connection when he argues, “With who’s in charge today, [telling Shakur’s story] is even more important. They’re torturing and killing people in our name.” (In 2005 the FBI reclassified Shakur as a domestic terrorist, offering a bounty of $1 million for her capture and return to the United States.)
The Justin-Asha storyline also overshadows Baker’s meditation on the stakes and costs of doing political filmmaking in a conservative era. This is another point well worth making, yet it could have been elucidated with more subtlety and finesse than it is here. In one particularly self-indulgent moment, Baker casts himself in the role of William Kunstler, the attorney who represented Shakur during her final trial. In the midst of Baker’s shouting and gesticulating, it is difficult to appreciate the fact that filmmakers sometimes do function as political radicals. Instead, Baker’s performance emphasizes the difference between his actions and Shakur’s. Baker’s film is not very likely to get him shot or imprisoned, nor is it likely to result in a million-dollar bounty on his head. That realization makes Justin’s warning that “there’s danger in the true telling of this story” sound like unfounded paranoia.
If the narrative frame ultimately undermines many of Baker’s political points, it also squanders the opportunity to tell Shakur’s story. In particular, it contributes to the mythologizing of her, rather than exploring the circumstances and choices that led to her incredible circumstance. Rather than trying to understand how the brutal repression and social injustice that defined the mid-century United States could have resulted in her actions, Baker substitutes Justin’s lame explanation: “That girl got revolution in her soul. While the rest of us were just sitting around talking about it, she went and did it. She went out and started it.” In fact, Shakur didn’t start it. That is not to say that she didn’t perform important political work, but that building a revolution isn’t glamorous, nor can it be summed up in images of armed Black Panthers.
Reading Shakur’s memoir, Assata: An Autobiography, one is struck by the ways in which daily forms of oppression compelled Shakur to critique her environment and the social arrangements underpinning it. One is reminded that black revolution in the 1960s and 1970s consisted of mundane actions: staffing free health clinics, feeding poor children breakfast, and working with white support groups to raise money to free imprisoned black radicals. Contrary to the image of activists who solely advocated armed self-defense, revolution meant engaging in the daily struggle to redistribute resources, educate oneself and one’s peers, and keep oneself and one’s loved ones safe from violent repression. Rather than touting the need to pick up the gun, Shakur repeatedly emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and analysis, the need to engage in dialogue with and persuade the masses rather than leading them like sheep.
What made Shakur’s ordinary actions extraordinary was the brutal and concerted reaction they aroused in a society unable to cede its white supremacy. The sobering truth was that feeding children and distributing tuberculosis shots inspired violent repression from the U.S. state. Basic black human rights proved antithetical to the U.S. state’s very conception of itself, democratic rhetoric notwithstanding.
Ultimately, the film lends us little insight into Shakur. Asha never gets to meet her and we are never told much about Shakur’s beliefs other than that she wanted freedom for her people. Rather than bringing us closer to Shakur, Baker merely substitutes one narrative about her (the demonized, dangerous black woman) with another: the quintessential freedom fighter. Such a one-dimensional representation may add luster to Shakur’s image, but it gives us little insight into how and why she became the tireless activist she was and still is; more importantly, it gives us few tools to follow in her illustrious footsteps. While Obama’s meteoric rise to fame and political power is a route few black people can follow, Shakur’s is not. What separates her and us is quite simply the willingness to critically engage one’s world and the unwillingness to let injustice and human suffering go unmarked and unchallenged.
Cynthia Young is Associate Professor of English and Director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Boston College. She is the author of Soul Power: Cultural Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Duke University Press, 2006).
