Haley Newlin’s Reviews > Assata: An Autobiography > Status Update

“Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.”

“Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.”

“The rich have always used racism to maintain power.”

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who are oppressing them.”

“It has always intrigued me how the world can be so beautiful and so ugly at the same.”

“Black men internalized the white man’s opinion of Black women.”

Assata says this goes back to plantations and slavery

“I am a black revolutionary and as such I’m a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that America is capable of. Like all other black revolutionaries, America is trying to lynch me.”

Assata remembers learning about George Washington in school. Celebrating him. But as she got older and researched history herself, she realized that when he was fighting for freedom in the Revolutionary War, he was fighting only for White freedom

“We had been completely brainwashed and we didn’t even know. We accepted white value systems and white standards of beauty, and at times, we accepted the white man’s view of ourselves.”

Assata remembers wanting to go to the zoo as a child and begging her grandmother for years who would always say “one day”

But that day never came bc the real reason they couldn’t go was bc they were Black.