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

by Angela Y. Davis

Most importantly if the intersectionality of struggles against racism, homophobia, and transphobia is minimized, we will never achieve significant victories in our fight for justice.

The Ferguson struggle has taught us that local issues have global ramifications.

and, some of you may have seen the new documentary on my trial, which shows President Richard Nixon, openly and ceremoniously, congratulating the FBI for catching me and in the process labeling me a terrorist as well.

They were investigating terrorism and in turn were charged with terrorism. I’m referring to the Cuban Five—Free the Cuban Five!

because, according to the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, sixty-three people have been killed by the Chicago Police Department in the last four years. And another 253 have been shot, 172 Black people and twenty-seven Latinos.

As it turns out, Sandy Stone was a trans woman, who later wrote some of the germinal texts in the development of transgender studies.

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there is a great deal to be learned about the potential of decarceration and abolition in relation to prisons, about the possibilities of abolishing the prison-industrial complex, by looking very closely at the deinstitutionalization of asylums and psychiatric institutions.

Miss Major says she prefers to be called Miss Major, not Ms. Major, because as a trans woman she is not yet liberated.

Male prisons are represented as violent places. But we see, especially by looking at the predicament of trans women, that this violence is often encouraged by the institutions themselves.

But on top of this violence, trans women are often denied their hormonal treatments, even if they have valid prescriptions.

TGIJP thus promotes a kind of feminism that urges us to be flexible, one that warns us not to become too attached to our objects,

Trans scholar-activists are doing some of the most interesting work on prison abolition.

although racism, the prison-industrial complex, criminalization, captivity, violence, and the law are all objects that feminism should analyze, criticize, and also resist through struggle—but I see these texts as feminist primarily because of their methodologies. And feminist methodologies can assist us all in major ways as researchers, academics, and as activists and organizers.

So at that moment square dancing became both Black and gay, which probably changed something about square dancing as well.

You remember that Don Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hoes” about five years ago? Five years later he’s rehabilitated!

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.

I am not so concerned about myself. Everybody has to die sometime, and all I want is to go with dignity. I am more concerned about the growing poverty, the growing despair that is rife in America.

am more concerned about the rise of the prison-industrial complex that is turning our people into slaves again. 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.

known as the Kissing Case. In Monroe, North Carolina, in 1958, a young Black boy about six years old kissed a white girl with whom he was playing and was arrested on attempted rape charges.

media attention generated in Europe that eventually led to the freeing of this young boy.

Birmingham was known as the Johannesburg of the South.

Had slavery been abolished in 1863, through the Emancipation Proclamation, or in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment, Black people would have enjoyed full and equal citizenship and it would not have been necessary to create a new movement.

One of the most hidden eras of US history is the period of Radical Reconstruction. It was certainly the most radical period. There were Black elected officials. Then we had to wait more than another century to get them back. There was the development of public education. People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South.

I’m talking about the period between 1865 and 1877, Radical Reconstruction.

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?...

The struggles of the 1960s would have been unnecessary if Black people had acquired full citizenship in the aftermath of slavery.

You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history.

History repeats itself and we continue to think individualistically

But among Black women 96 percent voted for Obama compared to 87 percent of Black men. Of Latinas, 76 percent compared to 65 percent of Latinos.

but we need to go further than simply applying heteronormative standards to all people who identify as members of the LGBT community.

And even people who have little to do with Islam are under attack. Sikhs, for example, who have been killed because their turbans have been misread as Muslim.

“Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Often people ask me how I would like to be remembered. My response is that I really am not that concerned about ways in which people might remember me personally. What I do want people to remember is the fact that the movement around the demand for my freedom was victorious.

“Transnational Solidarities: Resisting Racism, Genocide, and Settler Colonialism,”

This convention was passed in 1948, but it was not ratified by the US until 1987, almost forty years later.

Those of us of African descent in the US of my age are familiar with that sense of not being able to trace our ancestry beyond, as in my case, one grandmother. Deprivation of ancestry affects the present and the future.

research—he discovers that he cannot tell the story of slavery and US higher education without also simultaneously telling the story of the genocidal colonization of Native Americans.

I tell you that in the United States we are at such a disadvantage because we do not know how to talk about the genocide inflicted on indigenous people. We do not know how to talk about slavery.

What this means in one sense is that we may be given the opportunity to emerge from the individualism within which we are ensconced in this neoliberal era.

efforts to abolish the death penalty and imprisonment as the main modes of punishment.

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. But let me say that criminalization and imprisonment could not solve other problems.

County sheriffs and police chiefs from all over the country, agents of the FBI, and bomb technicians have been traveling to Israel to get lessons in how to combat terrorism.

tear-gas canisters that were being used in Ferguson were exactly the same tear-gas canisters that were used against them in occupied Palestine.

This is why I am always so cautious about the use of the term “terrorist.”

Everyone is familiar with the slogan “The personal is political”—not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. 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.

This means that we have to examine various dimensions of our lives—from social relations, political contexts—but also our interior lives.

The case of Jimmy Mubenga is important. He was killed by G4S guards in Britain in the process of being deported to Angola. G4S operates private prisons in South Africa. G4S is the largest corporate employer on the entire continent of Africa. G4S, this megacorporation that is involved in the ownership and operation of prisons, that provides armies with weapons, that provides security for rock stars, also operates centers for abused women and for “young girls at risk.”

You know the names of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Add the name of Marissa Alexander to that list, a young Black woman who felt compelled to go to extremes to prevent her abusive husband from attacking