I think this announcement about Assata Shakur is part of a project that will ultimately lead to rendering the terms/positions/figures "leftist" and "terrorist" as synonymous. As Davis argues on Democracy Now, the state is making this move to terrorize all activists fighting for structural societal change and to intimidate others away from becoming such activists.
But I want to make another connection as well, about the ways in which we can read this move alongside the defunding and destruction of leftist intellectual hubs - i.e. universities, and, in particular, humanities and social science programs (especially programs like History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz) that are not coincidentally where the preponderance of students and scholars of color can be found - as part of a project to limit student access to education about subjugated knowledges/histories, to limit the production of radical intellectual thought through the lack of resources available to grad students and non-academic/non-tenure stream intellectuals, and to ultimately brand all leftist/radical academics who (for now, at least for some, due to things such as tenure, are somewhat protected and legitimized) as terrorists, proto-terrorists, or terrorist allies.
Think about all of us with our PhDs in the humanities, now and several years down the line, who have or will have little to no access to protected speech, job security, and - perhaps mostly importantly in terms of waging ideological wars - legitimacy and status. Now, I am not talking about status in the sense of boosting our little or already overly-inflated egos, but the very real kinds of political capital, work/financial security, and cultural power that still, at least to some extent, gives the few remaining tenured/tenure-track professors some sort of leverage and legitimacy in sites such mass media. And alternative media. The two links I give in the first paragraph of this post could be considered routine examples.
Those of us outside the university, outside the tenure-stream, as well as those of us on the "inside" who are now and will increasingly be subjected threats to the security that those positions supposedly provide, need to remember - even though it is difficult to do so in the throes of un/underemployment, dismal prospects, excessive work (and/or the possibility of being abandoned back in to that illustrious precarious pool) - that what is happening in universities today is not just about our roles as academic laborers. In fact, if anything, the dismantling of tenure and programs has had the effect of elevating and focusing our identifications as laborers under capitalism rather than as intellectuals invested more broadly in a public/communal "good." And thus, many of us find ourselves in the precarious position of un/underemployed perennial debtors peddling unwanted educational wares whom the state will have little difficulty labeling as deadbeats, wingnuts, troublemakers, and, yes, terrorists.
And there will be nowhere in the world for us to escape. This, for me, is the "message" I am getting from the FBI and State of New Jersey's addition of Assata Shakur to the terrorist list and the doubling of the bounty on her head to $2 million, which, as Shakur's lawyer observes, gives carte-blanche to everyone in the world to track her down and abduct or murder her.
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