Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

by Angela Y. Davis

As a matter of fact, many progressive laws were passed when Black people were in the legislatures of various states, progressive laws with respect to women’s rights as well, not just with respect to issues of race.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America.

There was Claudette Colvin, too, who has a wonderful book, Twice Toward Justice.

You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement. He transformed in his relationship with that movement. He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the oppressed masses.

Then of course there was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. I think that the larger symbolic meaning of the deaths of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair, who were killed that Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama, has to do with the snuffing out of the lives of Black girls, who thus never had an opportunity to grow into women committed to the struggle for freedom. And it’s interesting because some months before they were killed, there were the children’s marches. During the children’s marches in Birmingham, children who stood up to the police, who stood up to the firemen with their high-power water hoses, and their dogs were responsible for some of the most dramatic moments of the entire campaign. Children were committed to justice. All of this gets erased when you obsessively focus on single individuals.

There are still many significant civil rights movements in the twenty-first century. The struggle for immigrant rights is a civil rights struggle. The struggle to defend the rights of prisoners is a civil rights struggle. The struggle for marriage equality with respect to LGBT communities is a civil rights struggle. But freedom is still more expansive than civil rights. And in the sixties there were some of us who insisted that it was not simply a question of acquiring the formal rights to fully participate in a society, but rather it was also about the forty acres and the mule that was dropped from the abolitionist agenda in the nineteenth century. It was about economic freedom.

So how do you address that contradiction of progress and regression at the very same time?

there’s a reason why most people never have the opportunity to look at the Black Panther Party “Ten-Point Program,” because those points are still very much on the agenda today.

there are more Black people incarcerated and directly under the control of correctional agencies in the second decade of the twenty-first century than there were enslaved in 1850.

By this time everybody who may have been hoping that Obama was the messiah realized that he was simply the president of the United States of America. Simply the president of the racist, imperialist United States of America.

When I say critique of marriage, I’m not talking about a critique of relations of intimacy and emotional connections, and the ties that we feel with people with whom we would like to spend our lives. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the institution as a capitalist institution that’s designed to guarantee the distribution of property.

And as I said before, immigrant rights are so important and it’s not just about the DREAM Act and paths to citizenship; it’s about welcoming the people who do so much of the labor that fuels the economy: the agricultural labor, the service labor, people who perform the labor that Black people used to perform. This should be considered a part of Black history and a part of the Black freedom struggle.

“Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Hrant Dink

Turkish/Armenian intellectual

Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Loïc Wacquant.

Let’s not forget that Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, Richard Nixon was the president of the US, and J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI.

Often people ask me how I would like to be remembered. My response is that I really am not that concerned about ways in which people might remember me personally. What I do want people to remember is the fact that the movement around the demand for my freedom was victorious.

“Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such, killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

My Grandmother, an Armenian Turkish memoir by Fethiye Çetin.

French Marxist anthropologist whose name is Claude Meillassoux.

This imposed silence with respect to ancestry reminded me that his definition of slavery has the concept of social death at its core.

Of course, there’s grave collective psychic damage that is a consequence of not being acknowledged within the context of one’s ancestry.

Deprivation of ancestry affects the present and the future.

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. This is the admonition “Learn your sisters’ stories” by Black feminist sociologist Jacqui Alexander.

We do not acknowledge that we all live on colonized land. And in the meantime, Native Americans live in impoverished conditions on reservations.

We do not know how to talk about slavery, except, perhaps, within a framework of victim and victimizer, one that continues to polarize and implicate.

Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators.

If one imagines these vast expressions of solidarity all over the world as being focused only on the fact that individual police officers were not prosecuted, it makes very little sense. I’m not suggesting that individuals should not be held accountable. Every individual who engages in such a violent act of racism, of terror, should be held accountable. But what I am saying is that we have to embrace projects that address the sociohistorical conditions that enable these acts.

Black police officers and police officers of color are subject to the same way in which racism structurally defines police work—but even as they may be influenced by this racism, it was not their individual idea to do this.

So simply by focusing on the individual as if the individual were an aberration, we inadvertently engage in the process of reproducing the very violence that we assume we are contesting.

What was interesting during the protests in Ferguson last summer was that Palestinian activists noticed from the images they saw on social media and on television that tear-gas canisters that were being used in Ferguson were exactly the same tear-gas canisters that were used against them in occupied Palestine. As a matter of fact, a US company, which is called Combined Systems, Incorporated, stamps “CTS” (Combined Tactical Systems) on their tear-gas canisters. When Palestinian activists noticed these canisters in Ferguson, what they did was to tweet advice to Ferguson protesters on how to deal with the tear gas. They suggested, among other things: “Don’t keep much distance from the police. If you’re close to them, they can’t tear gas,” because they would be tear-gassing themselves.