Top Quotes: “Freedom is a Constant Struggle” — Angela Davis
Background: A collection of speeches Davis has given which highlight the interconnectivity of progressive struggles around the world and the opportunity for organizers to learn from and support each other in a much more comprehensive way. She offers some great lessons on how to build a successful movement and an optimistic look forward.
“Progressive struggles — whether they’re focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues — are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism. Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to disassociated MLK Jr. from the vast numbers of people who constituted the very heart of the US freedom movement. It’s essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.”
“The problem with Obama’s election was that people who associated themselves with that movement did not continue to wield that collective power as pressure that might have compelled Obama to move in more progressive directions. What we have lacked over these last five years is not the right president, but rather well-organized mass movements.”
“Under the guise of security and the security state, Group 4 Security (G4S), the largest private security group in the world, has insinuated itself into the lives of people all over the world — especially in the UK, the US, and Palestine. This company is the third-largest private corporation in the world after Walmart and Foxcomm and is the largest private employer in Africa. It has learned how to profit from racism, anti-immigrant practices, and from technologies of punishment in Israel and throughout the world. G4S is directly responsible for the ways Palestinians experience political incarceration, as well as aspects of the apartheid wall, imprisonment in South Africa, prison-like schools in the US, and the US-Mexico border wall. Surprisingly, G4S also operates sexual assault centers in the UK.”
“Most Palestinian families have had at least one member imprisoned by the Israeli authorities. There’s currently some 5,000 Palestinian prisoners and we know that since 1967, 40% of the male population has been imprisoned by Israel. The demand to free all Palestinian political prisoners is a key ingredient of the demand to end the occupation.”
“It’s important for us to recognize the extent to which, in the aftermath of the war on terror, police departments all over the U.S. have been equipped with the means to allegedly ‘fight terror.’ The police slogan is ‘to protect and serve.’ Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.”
“All over the world now the institution of prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems. Getting rid of the people, putting them in prison is a way to not have to deal with immigration to Europe. Immigration, of course, happens as a result of all the economic changes that have happened globally — global capitalism, the restructuring of economies in countries of the Global South that makes it impossible for people to live there. 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 the era.”
“If one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the U.S., no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change has come as a result of mass movements — from the era of slavery, the Civil War, the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Lincoln, who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army — both women and men — that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. 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 now.”
“Our sisters and brothers’ struggles in Palestine have many similarities with those of South African apartheid, one of the most salient being the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubric of terrorism. I understand there’s evidence indicating historical collaboration between the CIA and the South African apartheid government — in fact, it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave SA authorities the location of Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, leading directly to his capture and imprisonment. It was not until 2008 that he was taken off the terrorist watch list.”
“If we say we abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine! In the U.S. when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern US — and especially before Black audiences — the response is often, ‘Why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron — not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?”
“Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators, but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy.”
“The very concept of freedom — which is held so dear throughout the West — must have been first imagined by slaves. During the era of the Black freedom movement, the human beings whose predicament most approximated that of slaves, that of the slaves from which they were descended, were Black women domestic workers — some 90% of Black women were domestic workers in the 1950s. And given the fact that the majority of the people who rode buses in Montgomery in 1955 were Black domestic workers, why is it so difficult to imagine and acknowledge what must have been, among these Black women domestic workers, this amazing collective imagination of a future world without racial and gender and economic oppression? That boycott would not have been successful without their refusal, without their critical refusals. And thus a figure like MLK Jr. might never have emerged into prominence.”
“People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South. The 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.”
“The St. Louis County police chief who oversaw Ferguson received ‘counterterrorism’ training in Israel. County sheriffs and police chiefs from all over the country, FBI agents, and bomb techs have been traveling to Israel to get lessons in how to combat terrorism. When one examines the ways in which racism has been further reproduced and complicated by the theories and practices of terrorism and counterterrorism, one begins to perhaps envision the possibility of political alliances that will move us in the direction of transnational solidarities. What was interesting was that Palestinian activists noticed from the images of Ferguson they saw on TV that tear-gas canisters that were being used in Ferguson were exactly the same tear-gas canisters that were used against them in occupied Palestine. What they did was tweet advice to Ferguson protesters on how to deal with tear gas. They suggested, among other things: ‘Don’t keep distance from the police. If you’re close to them, they can’t tear gas’ because they would really be tear-gassing themselves.”
