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

by Angela Y. Davis

imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.

questions about the validity of violence should have been directed to those institutions that held and continue to hold a monopoly on violence: the police, the prisons, the military.

Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice.

But especially with the Palestine solidarity movement. My experience has been that many people assume that in order to be involved with Palestine, you have to be an expert. So people are afraid to join because they say, “I don’t understand. It’s so complicated.” Then they hear someone who is truly an expert, who does indeed represent the movement, who is so thoroughly informed about the history of the conflict, who speaks about the failure of the Oslo Accords, et cetera, when this happened and why it’s important, but too often people feel that they are not sufficiently informed to consider themselves an advocate of justice in Palestine. The question is how to create windows and doors for people who believe in justice to enter and join the Palestine solidarity movement.

In many ways you can say that the prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.

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.

When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements—anchored by women, incidentally—that pushed the government to bring about change. I don’t see why things would be any different today.

So in many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality. Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation. That when we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine.

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.