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

by Angela Y. Davis

You’ve been an activist for decades. What keeps you going? Do you think we should remain optimistic about the future? Well, I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle. So whatever I’m doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities and I think that this is an era where 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.

He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would single him out at the expense of those who were always at his side. His profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism.

As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

there is evidence indicating historical collaboration between the CIA and the South African apartheid government—in fact, it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave SA authorities the location of Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, leading directly to his capture and imprisonment.

BDS movement—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement

G4S is especially important because it participates directly and blatantly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine—prisons, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, to name only a few examples. G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state and ideologies of security that bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare, as well as the privatization of health care and education.

G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—behind Walmart, which is the largest, and Foxconn, the second largest.

In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers.

the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

As private prison companies have long recognized, the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation.

G4S’s modus operandi is indicative of two of the most worrying aspects of neoliberal capitalism and Israeli apartheid: the ideology of “security” and the increasing privatization of what have been traditionally state run sectors. Security, in this context, does not imply security for everyone, but rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S Security (banks, governments, corporations etc.) it becomes evident that when G4S says it is “Securing your World,” as the company slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation and racism.

The fastest-growing sector consists of women—women of color. Many are queer or trans. As a matter of fact, 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 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.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators, but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles.

Orlando Patterson has argued that the very concept of freedom—which is held so dear throughout the West, which has inspired so many world historical revolutions—that very concept of freedom must have been first imagined by slaves. During the era of the twentieth-century Black freedom movement, the human beings whose predicament most approximated that of slaves, that of the slaves from whom they were descended, were Black women domestic workers. We’re referring to women who cleaned house, who cooked, who were laundrywomen. As a matter of fact during the 1950s, some 90 percent of all Black women were domestic workers. And given the fact that the majority of people who rode buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 were Black domestic workers, why is it so difficult to imagine and acknowledge what must have been, among these Black women domestic workers, this amazing collective imagination of a future world without racial and gender and economic oppression?

As a matter of fact, the Ku Klux Klan and the racial segregation that was so dramatically challenged during the mid-twentieth-century freedom movement was produced not during slavery, but rather in an attempt to manage free Black people who would have otherwise been far more successful in pushing forward democracy for all.

There is this freedom movement and then there is an attempt to narrow the freedom movement so that it fits into a much smaller frame, the frame of civil rights. Not that civil rights is not immensely important, but freedom is more expansive than civil rights.

It was not only a question of acquiring the formal rights to fully participate in society, but rather it was also about substantive rights—it was about jobs, free education, free health care, affordable housing, and also about ending the racist police occupation of Black communities.