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

by Angela Y. Davis

And once you’re in the apparatus… Yes. And it doesn’t matter that a Black woman heads the national police. The technology, the regimes, the targets are still the same. I fear 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…

If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim that “Black Lives Matter.”

But by extension, there’s another lesson: don’t even become too attached to the concept of gender. Because, as a matter of fact, the more closely we examine it, the more we discover that it is embedded in a range of social, political, cultural, and ideological formations. It is not one thing. There is not one definition, and certainly gender cannot now be adequately described as a binary structure with “male” being one pole and “female” at the other.

myths that body parts somehow make us who we are (and make us “less than” or “better than,” depending on which we may have).

In the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s. And I’m making this point because what happens when 2060 rolls around? Will people still be addressing these same issues?