Angela Davis is a genius.
I was reading this book on my Kindle, and highlighting every sentence that made me feel like “Wow, that is so profound” and then I had to stop myself, because it is not useful to highlight every line of the book. But really, just about every line of this book was like “Boom, wow, someone could go write a whole essay just about this.” The book is a series of interviews, so it’s not one single idea as the thru-line, but a collection of ideas about liberation. Here is a selection of passages that I highlighted and said “someone could go write a whole essay about this.”
About Black women and feminism, and the lack of intersectionality in white feminism. I definitely know that this is an ongoing problem with white feminism, and I need to learn more about how it actually plays out in real life.
“At the time of its emergence, Black women were frequently asked to choose whether the Black movement or the women’s movement was most important. The response was that this was the wrong question. The more appropriate question was how to understand the intersections and interconnections between the two movements.”
On private prisons and immigrant detention centers – I’ve learned a little about this topic but I need to learn more.
“Moreover, the most profitable sector of the private prison business is composed of immigrant detention centers. One can therefore understand why the most repressive anti-immigrant legislation in the United States was drafted by private prison companies as an undisguised attempt to maximize their profits.”
2020 has been the year that prison abolition came to be on my radar – I don’t think that there’s the political will to make it happen anytime soon, but I think that the idea has merits. I think that introducing prison abolition into the national dialogue, alongside defunding the police, is important – there is value in people having these conversations and envisioning a world that is different than what we have now.
“Abolitionist advocacy can and should occur in relation to demands for quality education, for antiracist job strategies, for free health care, and within other progressive movements. It can help promote an anticapitalist critique and movements toward socialism.”
I had never thought about Ferguson in this way before – that it fit into a larger global context, that the way police were militarized was not strictly an American issue, but connected to the militarization of police in Israel.
“Ferguson reminds us that we have to globalize our thinking about these issues. And if I were to be critical in a friendly way of the text, I would say that what it lacks is a global context, an international framework.”
“The militarization of the police leads us to think about Israel and the militarization of the police there—if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson was Gaza.”
On organizing and forming a movement – I think this is huge. Over the past year or so, I’ve learned a lot about getting adults to do things (with mixed success) and in a sense, organizing a movement is the same type of thing, but on a massive scale.
“But you can’t simply invite people to join you and be immediately on board, particularly when they were not necessarily represented during the earlier organizing processes. You have to develop organizing strategies so that people identify with the particular issue as their issue.”
On prison reform and prison abolition – Davis believes that creating better prisons is not the answer, but instead going to the root of the behavior that is criminalized.
“Reform doesn’t come after the advent of the prison; it accompanies the birth of the prison. So prison reform has always only created better prisons.”
“Why is that person bad? The prison forecloses discussion about that. What is the nature of that badness? What did the person do? Why did the person do that? If we’re thinking about someone who has committed acts of violence, why is that kind of violence possible? Why do men engage in such violent behavior against women? The very existence of the prison forecloses the kinds of discussions that we need in order to imagine the possibility of eradicating these behaviors.”
“Fannie Lou Hamer—some of you may have studied the history of the US civil rights movement, the US freedom movement, you may have run across the name of Fannie Lou Hamer—she was a sharecropper and a domestic worker. She was a timekeeper on a cotton plantation in the 1960s. And she emerged as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She said, “All my life, I have been sick and tired. Now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.””
“In 1964, she achieved national prominence when she demanded that members of her Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was a racially integrated party, be seated at the national Democratic Party Convention at the expense of seats that were given to the all-white Democratic Party delegation.”
“In the aftermath of the war, we find one of the most hidden eras of US history. And that is the period of Radical Reconstruction.”
Before I moved to Mississippi, my knowledge of Reconstruction was that it happened after the Civil War. That’s all. I didn’t know any details of the real changes that happened, how it ended, anything.
“We had Black elected officials, the development of public education. As a matter of fact, former slaves fought for the right to public education; that is to say, education that did not cost money as your education here costs. I’ll say parenthetically—the fight was for noncommodified education. And as a matter of fact white children in the South, poor white children who had not had education, gained access to education as a direct result of the struggles of former slaves. There were progressive laws passed challenging male supremacy. This is an era that is rarely acknowledged.”
This is huge – I think that white Americans largely avoid uncomfortable conversations about slavery, racism, colonization, both in history and in the present day. How is it that I graduated from college, and my knowledge of the civil rights movement was still Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, and no deeper than that, until I moved to Mississippi? I took AP history classes in high school, I could tell you about the French Revolution and the French Republican Calendar (today is 5 Nivôse CCXXIX in the French Republican Calendar, which is useful knowledge to absolutely nobody,) but I still have very poor knowledge of genocide that occurred where I live.
“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. Otherwise it would not have been assumed that simply because of the election of one Black man to the presidency we would leap forward into a postracial era. We do not acknowledge that we all live on colonized land. And in the meantime, Native Americans live in impoverished conditions on reservations. They have an extremely high incarceration rate—as a matter of fact, per capita the highest incarceration rate—and they suffer disproportionately from such diseases as alcoholism and diabetes. In the meantime, sports teams still mock indigenous people with racially derogatory names, like the Washington Redskins.”
I had never heard of this before, but it is such an interesting idea – I feel like I need to go and research more about all of it. It makes sense, that state violence is not the solution to sexual assault and doesn’t actually decrease instances of sexual assault.
““Carceral feminism,” which is a term that has begun to circulate recently—carceral feminisms, that is to say, feminisms that call for the criminalization and incarceration of those who engage in gender violence—do the work of the state. Carceral feminisms do the work of the state as surely as they focus on state violence and repression as the solution to heteropatriarchy and as the solution, more specifically, to sexual assault.”
This book is amazing and mind-opening and I probably need to go back and reread it soon.