She thought she was brainwashed to think this, that it was the white mans doing. These were the white standards of beauty. Even though this was the white man's idea of beauty she still, in some way, wanted to be that. Growing up she was told by the whites that she was ugly and lazy and that, "Niggas ain't shit." .
She was taught that the civil war was fought to free the slaves and it wasn't until she got to college that she found out that the civil war was really fought for economic reasons. "The fact that official slavery was abolished was only incidental." The civil war was the north going to war because they could not compete with the southern slaveholders. "The south was a threat to northern capitalism." .
Assata became interested in watching television and she would watch shows like, "Ozzie and Harriet," "Leave It to Beaver," and "Donna Reed." She wanted to have the life of those on the shows. She thought that that's how families should be like. She wanted to know why her family wasn't like those on the television shows. "Why didn't my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when I came home from school?" She wanted to know why she couldn't have their house or clothes. She began to feel like she was worthless, like she was trash. .
Her next door neighbor, Barbara, left her house wearing a white dress and a veil like a bride wears. She said that she was making her first communion, that she was catholic. Assata "wanted to wear a white dress and dress up like a bride, too." She soon converted to Catholicism. She was used to going to church and watching people "jumping all over the place." The catholic church was silent and cold, not what she was used to. When she got baptized she was supposed to have her godparents there, but her godparents were not catholic so the baptism was not real. They pulled strangers off the street, "they were supposed to be my godparents and they baptized me." .
One night she was told to wake up and was taken out of her home and taken to jail.
