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

by Angela Y. Davis

The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.

The use of state violence against Black people, people of color, has its origins in an era long before the civil rights movement—in colonization and slavery.

Then as now the use of armed representatives of the state was complemented by the use of civilians to perform the violence of the state. So we don’t have to stop at the era of the civil rights movement, we can recognize that practices that originated with slavery were not resolved by the civil rights movement. We may not experience lynchings and Ku Klux Klan violence in the same way we did earlier, but there still is state violence, police violence, military violence. And to a certain extent the Ku Klux Klan still exists.

The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.

Economic racism continues to exist. Racism can be discovered at every level in every major institution—including the military, the health care system, and the police.

I do think it is important to acknowledge an organization that existed in New York in the late sixties and seventies called the Third World Women’s Alliance. That organization published a newspaper entitled Triple Jeopardy. Triple jeopardy was racism, sexism, and imperialism.

We can’t only think about crime and punishment. We can’t only think about the prison as a place of punishment for those who have committed crimes. We have to think about the larger framework. That means asking: Why is there such a disproportionate number of Black people and people of color in prison? So we have to talk about racism. Abolishing the prison is about attempting to abolish racism. Why is there so much illiteracy? Why are so many prisoners illiterate? That means we have to attend to the educational system. Why is it that the three largest psychiatric institutions in the country are jails in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Rikers Island, Cook County Jail, and L.A. County Jail? That means we need to think about health care issues, and especially mental health care issues. We have to figure out how to abolish homelessness.

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.

Frederick Douglass wrote about the tendency to impute crime to color. He pointed out that a white man in Black face committed a whole range of crimes because he knew well that he would not be suspected by virtue of the fact that he was white. On the other hand all Black people were subject to the ideological link between Blackness and criminalization.

I don’t think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do.

If one looks at all of the legislation that was passed, the Civil Rights Act, for example, the Voting Rights Act, that did not happen as a result of a president taking extraordinary steps. It happened as a result of people marching and organizing.

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.

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

Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. 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.

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.

This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of twenty-first-century Western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimized the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarization of local police departments throughout the country.

Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history the very category “human” has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.

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. Feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses, and institutions, and identities, and ideologies that we often tend to consider separately. But it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories “women” and “gender.” And, feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

Black Americans have been the beneficiaries of solidarity generated in all parts of the world. Frederick Douglass traveled to Europe to gain support for antislavery abolition. Ida B. Wells traveled to England and Ireland and Scotland to generate support for the antilynching movement. And then of course Canada offered sanctuary from slavery. When the Fugitive Slave Law prevented those who escaped from slavery from finding refuge anywhere inside the United States, the Underground Railroad had to extend up to Canada.

People all over the world have been inspired by the Black freedom movement to forge activist movements addressing oppressive conditions in their own countries. In fact you might say that there has been a symbiotic relationship between struggles abroad and struggles at home, relationships of inspiration and mutuality. The historical South African freedom struggle was inspired in part by the historical Black American freedom struggle. The Black American freedom struggle was inspired in part by the South African freedom struggle.

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.

People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South. That white kids in the South would never have had the opportunity to get an education had not it been for the persistent campaigns for education. Because education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education.

When we speak about the Klan as symbolic of the whole edifice of racism, when we think about racial segregation, we often assume that it originated in slavery. But the Ku Klux Klan was founded in the aftermath of slavery, right? Racial segregation was instituted in the aftermath of slavery, in the aftermath of Black Radical Reconstruction, in an attempt to manage free Black people. What did it mean during those days for people who had been historically subjugated and kept in chains to have the opportunity to express themselves freely? Well, there were those who did not want to see this. Of course there were those who wanted to bring slavery back into the picture. But there were many strategies that were used to manage free Black bodies. Had those strategies not been implemented, such as the violence associated with the Ku Klux Klan, such as the convict lease system, which created the basis for the punishment industry today, had that not happened free Black people would have been far more successful in pushing for democracy for all people in this country. The struggles of the 1960s would have been unnecessary if Black people had acquired full citizenship in the aftermath of slavery.

There are still many significant civil rights movements in the twenty-first century. The struggle for immigrant rights is a civil rights struggle. The struggle to defend the rights of prisoners is a civil rights struggle. The struggle for marriage equality with respect to LGBT communities is a civil rights struggle. But freedom is still more expansive than civil rights.