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

by Angela Y. Davis

Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

perhaps we were not asked to reflect on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation because we might realize that we were never really emancipated.

that the only hope of winning the Civil War resided in creating the opportunity for Black people to fight for their own freedom, and that was the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

So in the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s, one hundred years later.

We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.

then I realized it wasn’t about me at all; it wasn’t about the individual at all.

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

All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.

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

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.

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.

work. These forms of punishment do not work when you consider that the majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them,

This retroactive criminalization of the late-twentieth-century Black liberation movements through targeting one of the women leaders at that time, who was so systematically pursued, is, I think, an attempt to deter people from engaging in radical political struggle today.

the corporations have learned how to access aspects of our lives that cause us to often express our innermost dreams in terms of capitalist commodities.

Racist and sexual violence are practices that are not only tolerated but explicitly—or if not explicitly, then implicitly—encouraged.

We will have to go to great lengths. We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.