rdmcandie wrote:
Have you actually ever heard the song?
Can't speak for anyone else, but I was curious, so I did. Have you?
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Now go listen to the song, or even just read the lyrics. The song is about prejudice in the judicial system, and within the police force, it is about another black person who was unjustly found guilty of a crime that they didn't commit. The song doesn't praise killing cops, it bags on the whole damn system at the time.
It's a song which perpetuates a lie in which a woman who committed numerous violent crimes is relabeled as innocent, mostly because of no reason other than a bunch of people insist that she was. She was *not* innocent and it's kinda sad to make a hero out of someone who was so casually violent. But sometimes you have to make such a big lie in order to cover the truth and so that no one looks too closely.
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Read the lyrics, then read the court case, then read the lyrics again....
Yeah. Read that. Also read a lot more about her than just that one case. What's wrong about the song is that it hypes and exaggerates claims about her mistreatment (many of which are just plain false like the claim that she was denied a lawyer), while utterly downplaying everything and anything which might cast her in a negative light:
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She untangled the chains and escaped the pain
How she broke out of prison I could never explain
And even to this day they try to get to her
but she's free with political asylum in Cuba.
Really? He could "never explain" how she broke out? Is that because he doesn't know? Or because he doesn't want to explain that 4 armed members of the black panthers used false IDs to sneak into the visitors section where she was held (and likely with some inside help since they were not searched when entering as they should have been), held multiple people at gunpoint, and broke her out. There's a whole lot of skipping over the details of just how many times she was involved in direct violent activities.
But if you mention that, then you have to explain how this "innocent" woman was so heavily connected with armed criminals that they'd pull off such a risky and dangerous plan to get her out. Why those guys must have all been good friends with spotless records themselves who decided to "do the right thing", right? Um... Wrong. The reality is that she was head deep in an ultra violent splinter group of the Black Panthers.
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(there is no proof that Assata was shot the cops, just a statement by a State Trooper, that he later said he had lied about and retracted it, that was the only thing linking her to killing the cops. The state trooper said he never saw her with a gun at all, and did not fire any shots.)
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Trooper Harper admitted to having lied in these reports and in his Grand Jury testimony about Trooper Foerster yelling and showing him an ammunition clip, about seeing Shakur holding a pocketbook or a gun inside the vehicle, and about Shakur shooting at him from the car. Trooper Harper retracted his previous statements and said that he had never seen Shakur with a gun, and that she did not shoot him
Yeah. What that account fails to clarify is that the parts he lied about had nothing to do with her guilt for the crimes she was convicted of. He made those admissions during cross-examination
at her trial. She was convicted because there was overwhelming evidence of her guilt, not because one officer lied about some relatively minor aspects of the case. In the specific case, they only needed to prove she was an accomplice to the murder, not that she actually pulled the trigger. So the facts that are used to claim she was innocent were actually irrelevant to the case.
Donbayne wrote:
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Or a good song apparently.