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

by Angela Y. Davis

It’s trying. Trying and trying again. Never stopping. That is a victory in itself.

The powerful have sent us a message: obey, and if you seek collective liberation, then you will be collectively punished.

On the other hand, if we take a step back, look at things from a broader angle, reflecting on what is happening all over the world and the history of struggle, the history of solidarity movements, it becomes clear, sometimes even obvious, that seemingly indestructible forces can be, thanks to people’s willpower, sacrifices, and actions, easily broken.

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.

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.

So there is this connection between the US military and the Israeli military. And therefore it means that when we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine, when we try to challenge the Israeli state, it’s not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere, in another place. It also has to do with what happens in US communities.

Michael Brown is just the tip of an iceberg. These kinds of confrontations and assaults and killings happen all of the time, all over the country in large as well as small cities. This is why it is a mistake to assume that these issues can be resolved on an individual level.

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.

It’s not easy to eradicate racism that is so deeply entrenched in the structures of our society, and this is why it’s important to develop an analysis that goes beyond an understanding of individual acts of racism and this is why we need demands that go beyond the prosecution of the individual perpetrators.

Reform doesn’t come after the advent of the prison; it accompanies the birth of the prison. So prison reform has always only created better prisons.

Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence. In many ways you can say that the institution feeds on that violence and reproduces it so that when the person is released he or she is probably worse.

I think that you can say that all over the world now the institution of the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems.

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.

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.

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 that feminism doesn’t belong to anyone in particular.

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.

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.

I think that movements, feminist movements, other movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.

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.

I would dare say that most people who are familiar with Dr. Martin Luther King—and the vast majority of people in the world are familiar with him—they know little more than the fact that he had a dream.

the violence of European colonization, including the slave trade, constitutes the common history of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the American hemisphere. In other words, there is a longer and larger history of the violence we witness today.

When various public figures asked, “Where are the leaders?” the movement said we are not a leaderless movement, we are a leader-full movement. Your movement announced that we do not now need the traditional, recognizable Black male charismatic leader. We definitely love Martin and Malcolm and deeply appreciate their historical contributions, but we need not replicate the past.

Certainly we need a great deal more than talk, but it is also the case that we need to learn how to talk about race and racism. If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.

a central endeavor of feminist, queer, and trans activists has been to dismantle the cultural ideologies, social practices, and legal norms that say certain body parts determine gender identity and gendered social characteristics and roles.

We have fought against the idea that the presence of uteruses, or ovaries, or penises, or testicles, should be understood to determine such things as people’s intelligence, proper parental roles, proper physical appearance, proper gender identity, proper labor roles, proper sexual partners and activities, and capacity to make decisions.

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

From California or Texas or Illinois to Israel and Occupied Palestine, and then back to Florida, we should not have allowed this to happen. We should not have allowed this to happen over the last three decades. And we cannot allow it to continue today.

education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education.

if they had that very narrow individualistic sense of their own contributions, where would we be today? And so we have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that are not restricted to our own lifetimes.

Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus. These are the people whom we have to thank for imagining a different universe and making it possible for us to inhabit this present.

education has thoroughly become a commodity. It has been so thoroughly commoditized that many people don’t even know how to understand the very process of acquiring knowledge because it is subordinated to the future capacity to make money.

I think some wires in my brain just shifted a little bit

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.

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, because they’ve had no access to education or jobs or housing or health care.

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.