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

by Angela Y. Davis

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. The more appropriate question was how to understand the intersections and interconnections between the two movements.

the most profitable sector of the private prison business is composed of immigrant detention centers.

Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice.

The demand to free all Palestinian political prisoners is a key ingredient of the demand to end the occupation.

It’s very interesting that during the commentary on Ferguson, someone pointed out that the purpose of the police is supposed to be to protect and serve. At least, that’s their slogan. Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill.

The major challenge of this period is to infuse a consciousness of the structural character of state violence into the movements that spontaneously arise…I

The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.

The question is how to create windows and doors for people who believe in justice to enter and join the Palestine solidarity movement.

If we’re thinking about someone who has committed acts of violence, why is that kind of violence possible? Why do men engage in such violent behavior against women? The very existence of the prison forecloses the kinds of discussions that we need in order to imagine the possibility of eradicating these behaviors.

We can’t only think about the prison as a place of punishment for those who have committed crimes. We have to think about the larger framework.

institution of the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems.

prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.

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.

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a certain kind of consciousness that has to be encouraged so that progressive men are aware that they have a certain responsibility to bring in more men.

cannot understand why the death penalty continues to exist in the United States in the way that it does, without an analysis of slavery.

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

Black struggle in the US serves as an emblem of the struggle for freedom. It’s emblematic of larger struggles for freedom.

nothing happens in isolation. That when we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine.

the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation.

trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned.

Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and e...

that very concept of freedom must have been first imagined by slaves.

The House That Herman Built.

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This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of twenty-first-century Western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimized the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarization of local police departments throughout the country.

For most of our history the very category “human” has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.

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

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.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender.

There is a deep relationality that links struggles against institutions and struggles to reinvent our personal lives, and recraft ourselves.

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.

education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education.

B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America.

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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.

the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.”

The militarization of the police in the US, of police forces all over the country has been accomplished in part with the aid of the Israeli government, which has been sharing its training with police forces all over the country since the period in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

There is a difference between outcome and impact.