This past July 16th, socialist activists and revolutionaries everywhere celebrated the birthday of one of our favorite comrades, Assata Shakur. Do yourself a favor and read her autobiography sometime, if you get the chance. She’s a cool lady who writes with power and beauty, from the perspective of someone who’s put a lifetime of effort into organizing against injustice.

But some aren’t fond of our ex-Black Panther and political fugitive. Some want Assata extradited from Cuba and to face the death penalty. Irresponsibly, famed Youtube White feminist, Laci Green decided she’d critcize the official Women’s March account for posting a happy birthday wish about/to Assata. I’m not going to repeat her disrespectful and blatantly false statement about Assata, just unpack it a little and use this incident to, once more, emphasize the dangerous and arrogant nature of Whiteness in liberal feminism in the United States.

It must be said that, even if Shakur had killed the police officer as alleged, we socialists would still support her in her struggle against the US carceral state, and defend her from warmongerers and racists who want to extradite her from Cuba. There are several problems with the “Shakur is a murderer” narrative, notably, that her own autobiography shows that the FBI was obsessed with hunting down and eliminating radical black activists and organizers (Assata in particular) in order to diminish the civil rights gains they made on the ground in their community. Witnesses from the trial have defaulted on their previous statements, and the “evidence” linking Shakur to a cop killing is flimsy at best. That Laci Green invokes the specter of the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list is already adjacent to both Klan rhetoric and a lack of liberal skepticism, but moreover, Green’s complete obtuseness towards the danger of State surveillance on Black radicals suggests either profound ignorance or violent racism. Or both. Evidence from the FBI’s archives on the COINTELPRO operations allows me to conclude that Laci is simply spewing a (to some, this is mild) form of hate speech. Her feminism is for white women - Laci is selling a brand of ostensible sex positive feminism that excludes women of color, is anti-communist, and she has been known to engage in scientific transphobia by claiming that sex is biological and not, as scientists actually say, itself a social construct. So, to trust that she is properly characterizing Assata Shakur is naive at best.

The function of anti-communist sentiment in the United States is mostly to bring up the fear of the collapsed Soviet Union in the minds of Americans who lived through the Cold War in order to manufacture consent for unjust policies. Simply, it’s a fascist tactic. It is important to defend the modern revolutionary, especially Black radical women survivors still sought by the State. Assata is an icon, but a human and a Black woman. Laci Green ignored Assata’s humanity for retweets. And that’s just not okay, folks