Angela Davis Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Angela Davis. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.
Angela Y. Davis
Radical simply means "grasping things at the root.
Angela Y. Davis
The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?
Angela Y. Davis
You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
Angela Y. Davis
[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
Angela Y. Davis
In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.
Angela Y. Davis
If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.
Angela Y. Davis
Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.
Angela Y. Davis
Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.
Angela Y. Davis
When Obama was elected president, a prisoner said “one black man in the White House doesn’t make up for one million black men in the Big House.
Angela Y. Davis
It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
Angela Y. Davis
I don't think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it's only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
I feel that if we don't take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist who is the perpetrator, then we won't ever succeed in eradicating racism.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
In many ways you can say that the prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
I try never to take myself for granted as somebody who should be out there speaking. Rather, I'm doing it only because I feel there's something important that needs to be conveyed.
Angela Y. Davis
Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
Anyway I don't think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation
Angela Y. Davis
If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series))
Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" -- not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.
Angela Y. Davis
It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle. What
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators. But how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism?
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
If Black people had simply accepted a status of economic and political inferiority, the mob murders would probably have subsided. But because vast numbers of ex-slaves refused to discard their dreams of progress, more than ten thousand lynchings occurred during the three decades following the war.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
But there’s a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory. The
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
When Black women stand up— as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
The lawbreaker is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
A woman of color formation might decide to work around immigration issues. This political commitment is not based on the specific histories of racialized communities or its constituent members, but rather constructs an agenda agreed upon by all who are a part of it. In my opinion, the most exciting potential of women of color formations resides in the possibility of politicizing this identity – basing the identity on politics rather than the politics on identity.
Angela Y. Davis
The roots of sexism and homophobia are found in the same economic and political institutions that serve as the foundation of racism in this country and, more often than not, the same extremist circles that inflict violence on people of color are responsible for the eruptions of violence inspired by sexist and homophobic biases. Our political activism must clearly manifest our understanding of these connections.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Culture, and Politics)
How would you explain the popularity of this narrative that the oppressed have to ensure the safety of the oppressors? Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.
Angela Y. Davis
I often like to talk about feminism not as something that adheres to bodies, not as something grounded in gendered bodies, but as an approach- as a way of conceptualizing, as a methodology, as a guide to strategies for struggle. That means feminism doesn't belong to anyone in particular
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents
Angela Y. Davis
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
Angela Y. Davis
The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
If one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
I think that this is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim that "Black Lives Matter." Or, as we discover on the BLM website: Black Women Matter, Black Girls Matter, Black Gay Lives Matter, Black Bi Lives Matter, Black Boys Matter, Black Queer Lives Matter, Black Men Matter, Black Lesbians Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Black Immigrants Matter, Black Incarcerated Lives Matter. Black Differently Abled Lives Matter. Yes, Black Lives Matter, Latino/Asian American/Native American/Muslim/Poor and Working-Class White Peoples Lives matter. There are many more specific instances we would have to nane before we can ethically and comfortably claim that All Lives Matter.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.
Angela Y. Davis
The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series))
Of course, there's a grave collective psychic damage that is a consequence of not being acknowledged within the context of one's ancestry. Those of us of African descent in the US of my age are familiar with that sense of not being able to trace our ancestry beyond, as in my case, one grandmother.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
How can we produce a sense of belonging to communities in struggle that is not evaporated by the onslaught of our everyday routines? How do we build movements capable of generating the power to compel governments and corporations to curtail their violence?
Angela Y. Davis (Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (Open Media Series))
[Trans women] have to fight to be included within the category “woman” in a way that is not dissimilar from the earlier struggles of Black women and women of color who were assigned the gender female at birth.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
The majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
We must begin to create a revolutionary, multiracial women’s movement that seriously addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Culture & Politics)
Yes, I am a Communist. And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.
Angela Y. Davis (If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance)
Communities are always political projects, political projects that can never solely rely on identity.
Angela Y. Davis (Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (Open Media Series))
Local issues have global ramifications.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Black history is indeed American history, but it is also world history.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression . Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.
Angela Y. Davis (Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire)
Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies. Though
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
Perhaps most important of all, and this is so central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal." Prisons are constituted as "normal." It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars, and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Walls turned sideways are bridges.
Angela Davis
The freedom movement was expansive. It was about transforming the entire country. It was not simply about acquiring civil rights within a framework that itself would not change.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago.
James Baldwin
And I should say parenthetically, when I learned about this in May, I remembered when I was placed on the Ten Most Wanted. I didn’t make the Ten Most Wanted terrorist list, I think they didn’t have one at that time, but I made the Ten Most Wanted criminal list. And I was represented as armed and dangerous. And you know one of the things I remember thinking to myself was, what is this all about? What could I possibly do? And then I realized it wasn’t about me at all; it wasn’t about the individual at all. It was about sending a message to large numbers of people whom they thought they could discourage from involvement in the freedom struggles at that time.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
According to a recent study, there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series))
The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Just as the struggle to end South African apartheid was embraced by people all over the world and was incorporated into many social justice agendas, solidarity with Palestine must likewise be taken up by organizations and movements involved in progressive causes all over the world.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles. .
Angela Y. Davis
An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why "criminals" have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category "lawbreakers" is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the program of the women’s rights movement as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner—as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related. Within
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
With that solitude came the greatest luxuries: the time to read, the opportunity to wander, and the chance to think new thoughts.
Alice Kaplan (Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis)
We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the "evildoers," to use a term recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, "criminals" and "evildoers" are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
In the case of the United States, Black and Native lives are systematically choked by an enduring white supremacy that thrives on oppression and settler colonialism, and is backed by drones, the dispossession of territory and identity to millions, mass incarceration, the un-peopleing of people, and resource grabs that deny that indigenous lives matter and that our planet matters.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women’s prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts.
Angela Y. Davis
There is a difference between outcome and impact. Many people assume that because the encampments are gone and nothing tangible was produced, that there was no outcome. But when we think about the impact of these imaginative and innovative actions and these moments where people learned how to be together without the scaffolding of the state, when they learned to solve problems without succumbing to the impulse of calling the police, that should serve as a true inspiration for the work that we will do in the future to build these transnational solidarities.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people. Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Expediency governed the slaveholders’ posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles. When
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit. At the time of its emergence, Black women were frequently asked to choose whether the Black movement or the women’s movement was most important. The response was that this was the wrong question.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Like racism, sexism is one of the great justifications for high female unemployment rates. Many women are “just housewives” because in reality they are unemployed workers. Cannot, therefore, the “just housewife” role be most effectively challenged by demanding jobs for women on a level of equality with men and by pressing for the social services (child care, for example) and job benefits (maternity leaves, etc.) which will allow more women to work outside the home?
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race & Class)
Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
James Baldwin
Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners. Therefore if, and this is one of the problems with all of the reform movements, if you think of the prisoners simply as the objects of the charity of others, you defeat the very purpose of antiprison work. You are constituting them as an inferior in the process of trying to defend their rights.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
Whoever challenged the racial hierarchy was marked a potential victim of the mob. The endless roster of the dead came to include every sort of insurgent—from the owners of successful Black businesses and workers pressing for higher wages to those who refused to be called “boy” and the defiant women who resisted white men’s sexual abuses. Yet public opinion had been captured, and it was taken for granted that lynching was a just response to the barbarous sexual crimes against white womanhood.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race, & Class)
Those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker's words, "Strong people don't need [a] strong leader." Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her fifty-year career working in the trenches of racial-justice struggles, but what she meant was specific and contextual. She was calling for people to disinvest from the notion of the messianic, charismatic leader who promises political salvation in exchange for deference. Baker also did not mean that movements would naturally emerge without collective analysis, serious strategizing, organizing, mobilizing and consensus building.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
The militarization of the police leads us to think about Israel and the militarization of the police there—if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson was Gaza. I think that it is important to recognize the extent to which, in the aftermath of the advent of the war on terror, police departments all over the US have been equipped with the means to allegedly “fight terror.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is pervaded with assumptions of both Black and female inferiority. Most Black people are docile and domestic, and most women are mothers and little else. As ironic as it may seem, the most popular piece of anti-slavery literature of that time perpetuated the racist ideas which justified slavery and the sexist notions which justified the exclusion of women from the political arena where the battle against slavery would be fought.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race & Class)
Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice. This occurred in South Africa during the antiapartheid struggle. Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008. The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men's social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men's. This was one of the greatest ironies of the slave system, for in subjecting women to the most ruthless exploitation conceivable, exploitation which knew no sex distinctions, the groundwork was created not only for Black women to assert their equality through social relations, but also to express it through their acts of resistance.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race & Class)
Even the most radical white abolitionists, basing their opposition to slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds failed to understand that the rapidly developing capitalism from the North was also an oppressive system. They viewed slavery as a detestable and inhuman institution, an archaic transgression of justice. But they did not recognize that the white worker in the North, his or her status as "free" laborer notwithstanding, was no different from the enslaved "worker" in the South: both were victims of economic exploitation.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race & Class)
Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism— I mean, the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name. Feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses, and institutions, and identities, and ideologies that we often tend to consider separately. But it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories “women” and “gender.” And, feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle)
White women—feminists included—have revealed a historical reluctance to acknowledge the struggles of household workers. They have rarely been involved in the Sisyphean task of ameliorating the conditions of domestic service. The convenient omission of household workers’ problems from the programs of “middle-class” feminists past and present has often turned out to be a veiled justification—at least on the part of the affluent women—of their own exploitative treatment of their maids. In 1902 the author of an article entitled “A Nine-Hour Day for Domestic Servants” described a conversation with a feminist friend who had asked her to sign a petition urging employers to furnish seats for women clerks. “The girls,” she said, “have to stand on their feet ten hours a day and it makes my heart ache to see their tired faces.” “Mrs. Jones,” said I, “how many hours a day does your maid stand upon her feet?” “Why, I don’t know,” she gasped, “five or six I suppose.” “At what time does she rise?” “At six.” “And at what hour does she finish at night?” “Oh, about eight, I think, generally.” “That makes fourteen hours …” “… (S)he can often sit down at her work.” “At what work? Washing? Ironing? Sweeping? Making beds? Cooking? Washing dishes? … Perhaps she sits for two hours at her meals and preparing vegetables, and four days in the week she has an hour in the afternoon. According to that, your maid is on her feet at least eleven hours a day with a score of stair-climbings included. It seems to me that her case is more pitiable than that of the store clerk.” My caller rose with red cheeks and flashing eyes. “My maid always has Sunday after dinner,” she said. “Yes, but the clerk has all day Sunday. Please don’t go until I have signed that petition. No one would be more thankful than I to see the clerks have a chance to sit …
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race & Class)
Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments
Louise Erdrich (The Sentence)