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

by Angela Y. Davis

Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal.

it is important to develop vocabularies that help us acknowledge that civil rights was and is not the entire story. Such an analysis of racism would be helpful to those who are celebrating yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on marriage equality as if the final barrier to justice for LGBTQ communities had been surmounted.

One of the major examples of the violence of racism consists of the rearing of generations of Black people who have not learned how to imagine the future—who are not now in possession of the education and the imagination that allows them to envision the future.

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

Being at a historical distance, however, does not extricate us from the responsibility of defending and indeed liberating those who were and still are willing to give their lives so that we might build a world that is free of racism, and imperialist war, and sexism, and homophobia, and capitalist exploitation.

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.

The retributive impulses of the state are inscribed in our very emotional responses. The political reproduces itself through the personal.

we don’t even acknowledge the fact that psychiatric institutions are often an important part of the prison-industrial complex, nor do we acknowledge the intersection of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex.

No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism.

The movement we call the “civil rights movement,” and that was called by most of its participants the “freedom movement,” reveals an interesting slippage between freedom and civil rights, as if civil rights has colonized the whole space of freedom, that the only way to be free is to acquire civil rights within the existing framework of society.

You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement.

There has been an attempt to co-opt that movement for purposes of creating a historical memory that fits into the smaller frame of civil rights. And I’m not suggesting of course that civil rights are not important. 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.

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.

there are more Black people incarcerated and directly under the control of correctional agencies in the second decade of the twenty-first century than there were enslaved in 1850.

We shouldn’t take the position that now that the tents are gone nothing is left. There’s a great deal left.

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.

Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.

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.

the greatest challenge facing us as we attempt to forge international solidarities and connections across national borders is an understanding of what feminists often call “intersectionality.” Not so much intersectionality of identities, but intersectionality of struggles.

We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.