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

by Angela Y. Davis

acknowledging these continuities requires a challenge to the closures that isolate the freedom movement of the twentieth century from the century preceding and the century following.

for a world that is no longer mutilated by the ravages of capitalism.

In fact, during the latter twentieth century, there were numerous debates about how to define the category “woman.” There were numerous struggles over who got included and who was excluded from that category. And these struggles, I think, are key to understanding why there was some measure of resistance from women of color, and also poor and working-class white women, to identify with the emergent feminist movement. Many of us considered that movement at that time to be too white and especially too middle class, too bourgeois. And in some senses the struggle for women’s rights was ideologically defined as a struggle for white middle-class women’s rights, pushing out working-class and poor women, pushing out Black women, Latinas, and other women of color from the discursive field covered by the category “woman.”

The point that I’m trying to make is that we learn a great deal about the reach of the prison system, about the nature of the prison-industrial complex, about the reach of abolition by examining the particular struggles of trans prisoners, and especially trans women.

we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as “normal.” Prisons are constituted as “normal.” It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars, and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism—I mean, the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sex-ualities than we ever thought we could name.

And it seems to me that people who are working on the front line of the struggle against violence against women should also be on the front line of abolitionist struggles. And people opposed to police crimes, should also be opposed to domestic—what is constructed as domestic—violence. We should understand the connections between public violence and private or privatized violence.

We know, for example, that we replicate the structures of retributive justice oftentimes in our own emotional responses. Someone attacks us, verbally or otherwise, our response is what? A counterattack. The retributive impulses of the state are inscribed in our very emotional responses. The political reproduces itself through the personal.

Prisons are racism incarnate.

They represent the increasingly global strategy of dealing with populations of people of color and immigrant populations from the countries of the Global South as surplus populations, as disposable populations.

They = prisions

It is also outrageous that the state of Israel uses the carceral technologies developed in relation to US prisons not only to control the more than eight thousand Palestinian political prisoners in Israel but also to control the broader Palestinian population.

And what I like most about the younger generation is that they are truly informed by feminism. Even if they don’t know it, or even if they don’t admit it! They are informed by antiracist struggles. They are not infected with the emotionally damaging homophobia which has been with us for so long. And they are taking the lead in challenging transphobia along with racism and Islamophobia. So I like working with young people because they allow me to imagine what it is like not to be so totally overburdened with decades of oppressive ideology.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America.

In the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s. And I’m making this point because what happens when 2060 rolls around? Will people still be addressing these same issues? And I also think it’s important for us to think forward and to imagine future history in a way that is not restrained by our own lifetimes. Oftentimes people say, well, if it takes that long, I’ll be dead. So what? Everybody dies, right? And if people who were involved in the struggle against slavery—I’m thinking about people like Frederick Douglass, or Ida B. Wells in the struggle against lynching—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.

and 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.

And as I said before, immigrant rights are so important and it’s not just about the DREAM Act and paths to citizenship; 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.

For some time now I have been involved in efforts to abolish the death penalty and imprisonment as the main modes of punishment. I should say that it is not simply out of empathy with the victims of capital punishment and the victims of prison punishment, who are overwhelmingly people of color. It is because these modes of punishment don’t 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, because they’ve had no access to education or jobs or housing or health care.

We ourselves often do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.

It’s interesting that in this era of global capitalism the corporations have learned how to do that: 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. So we have internalized exchange value in ways that would have been entirely unimaginable to the authors of Capital. But this is the topic of another lecture.

Very curious on this