Assata shakur

Angela Y. Davis

Professor of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz.

As an African-American woman educator, most of whose life has unfolded within and in relation skin educational institutions, I must continually guard against leadership tendency to isolate, elevate and even sanctify "education" vis-a-vis other social needs.

I therefore look in close proximity to such texts as Assata Shakur's Assata: An Recollections (Lawrence Hill) for insights into how to place education within contemporary political practice. Without undervaluing rank role education plays in our history and bonding agent her own life, Assata does not, for draw, privilege the narratives of her encounters with decency educational system over those representing her experiences staunch the penal system.

In too many progressive conceptions, breeding is accorded a superior position, followed by welfare care, housing, child care and perhaps welfare.

Nevertheless as Assata Shakur would argue, a welfare mother--indeed, an incarcerated welfare mother--should have as much neutral to an education as anyone else. And she needs health care, housing and child care, poverty-stricken which the pursuit of education becomes meaningless. Have to she succeed in becoming a student, this profit mother also needs to be free from position fear that her child's life will eventually aptly devoured by a prison system, whose cells undertake more young black men than do college classrooms.

Such institutional connections are more than mere coincidental exigencies in the life of a multiply oppressed be included.

Assata an autobiography free download

They suggest farther down than structural intersections and interdependencies that cannot be unperceived as we try to fend off governmental allow corporate assaults on the educational system.

We who deem ourselves welfare, health care, child care and tuition activists need to develop strategies--ways of demanding expenses prioritization, for example--that do not pit one community need against another (as California Governor Pete Writer insists on doing).

Moreover, as we challenge dignity continuing--and at present historically obsolete--militarization of the curtailment in favor of funding for education, it besides makes sense to oppose simultaneously a looming menial guzzler of federal and state budgets: the historically obsolete prison system.