Abolition Democracy Quotes

“How can we produce a sense of belonging to communities in struggle that is not evaporated by the onslaught of our everyday routines? How do we build movements capable of generating the power to compel governments and corporations to curtail their violence?”
― Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy

“The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression . Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire

“Communities are always political projects, political projects that can never solely rely on identity.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy

“DuBois pointed out that in order to fully abolish the oppressive conditions produced by slavery, new democratic institutions would have to be created. Because this did not occur; black people encountered new forms of slavery—from debt peonage and the convict lease system to segregated and second-class education. The prison system continues to carry out this terrible legacy. It has become a receptacle for all of those human beings who bear the inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of slavery. And this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by poor Latino, Native American, Asians, and white prisoners. Moreover, its use as such a receptacle for people who are deemed the detritus of society is on the rise throughout the world.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy

“Guantánamo has a long and ugly history. Ten years ago, the military prison in Guantánamo was employed as the world’s only detention center for refugees who were HIV-positive. In 1993, Hatian prisoners conducted a hunger strike to protest their detention and vast numbers of people in the U.S. joined the fast as a gesture of solidarity. But you are referring to the outlaw military prison where initially anything was possible because the U.S. government believed that a facility that is outside the U.S. could also be outside the reach of U.S. law.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy

“This movement was something so extraordinary, not only because it saved my life—and that was a major accomplishment—but also because it demonstrated that change was possible as a result of organized, mass pressure.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy