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

by Angela Y. Davis

Racism is so dangerous because it does not necessarily depend on individual actors, but rather is deeply embedded in the apparatus…

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.

we cannot simply look at gender in isolation from race, from class, from sexuality, from nationality, from ability,

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Assata Shakur, who received political asylum in Cuba after escaping from a US prison during the 1980s, was just recently designated one of the Ten Most Wanted terrorists in the world.

It was about sending a message to large numbers of people whom they thought they could discourage from involvement in the freedom struggles at that time. Assata Shakur is one of the ten most dangerous terrorists in the world according to Homeland Security and the FBI, and then when I think about the violence of my own youth in Birmingham, Alabama, where bombs were planted repeatedly and houses were destroyed and churches were destroyed and lives were destroyed, and we have yet to refer to those acts as the acts of terrorists.

The FBI is attempting to persuade people, it seems to me, who are the grandchildren of Assata’s generation—and mine as well—to turn away from struggles to end police violence, to dismantle the prison-industrial complex, struggles to end violence against women, struggles to end the occupation of Palestine, struggles to defend the rights of immigrants here

We also question whether incarcerating individual perpetrators does anything more than reproduce the very violence that the perpetrators have allegedly committed. In other words criminalization

I am more concerned about the repression, the police brutality, violence, the rising wave of racism that makes up the political landscape of the US today. Our young people deserve a future, and I consider it the mandate of my ancestors to be a part of the struggle to ensure that they have one.

But freedom is still more expansive than civil rights.

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.