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

by Angela Y. Davis

But you can’t simply invite people to join you and be immediately on board, particularly when they were not necessarily represented during the earlier organizing processes. You have to develop organizing strategies so that people identify with the particular issue as their issue. This is why I was suggesting in response to the question about Michelle Alexander that these connections need to be made in the context of the struggles themselves. So as you are organizing against police crimes, against police racism, you always raise parallels and similarities in other parts of the world. And not only similarities, but you talk about the structural connections. What is the connection between the way the US police forces train and are armed and Israeli police and military…. So when you popularize that, encourage people to think about that… …in a global way… …exactly. This is one of the reasons I think so many people began to identify with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It wasn’t a sense of “Oh, we have to lend solidarity to these people over there in South Africa.” It was because they began to see that we have a common…connection. If that’s not created, no matter how much you appeal to people, no matter how genuinely you invite them to join you, they will continue to see the activity as yours, not theirs.