Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

This is another interview conducted by Frank Barat with Angela Davis on September 21, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium. Davis continues discussing the importance of the collective struggle and urges global solidarity, particularly with the Palestinian struggle. She argues that our analysis and thinking should always have a global framework. For example, she compares the police militarization in response to the Ferguson protests in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown and ongoing police militarization in Israel as examples highlighting the need for global context. The connecting piece of information is knowing that many US police forces have been trained by Israeli forces or in Israel.

Davis continues her emphasis on interconnections and intersectionality of movements from the first interview. However, Davis suggests that today’s interpretation of intersectionality is about not only intersections of experiences or identities, but also the interconnections between various progressive struggles and movements all over the world. She advocates for exploring the common factors that exist among struggles against oppression globally, such as between Ferguson and Palestine. Key to building solidarity between various struggles is helping people see other struggles as their own.

Davis speaks about her belief that we cannot solve issues on an individual level; rather, we need to recognize the structural nature of racism or other issues. While the civil rights movement helped eliminate legal racism and segregation, it did not eliminate structural racism rooted within institutions, such as the police or the health care system. Understanding structural racism helps to show that the killings of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown were not just isolated incidents that can be solved by prosecuting individuals but that each was rather “the tip of an iceberg” (15). Davis elaborates: “Racism is so dangerous because it does not necessarily depend on individual actors, but rather is deeply embedded in the apparatus […]” (17-18). Thus, for instance, a Black woman could lead a police force, but Black people would still be targets of state violence because racism is entrenched in the institution of policing itself.

Davis again pushes for prison abolition but acknowledges the difficulty of getting society to view prisons differently. Abolition requires a broader framework beyond punishment or just the physical removal of prisons and requires exploring how to address racism, failures in the education and health care systems, the privatization of prisons, and the effect of global capitalism on the Global South, and other issues. Prisons have become solutions to dealing with such social problems rather than addressing the underlying issues or why an individual committed certain actions. To achieve this goal, prisoners themselves must be included as partners in the movement.

Essay 3 is this book’s third and final interview conducted by Frank Barat with Angela Davis and takes place in Paris, France, on December 10, 2014. In this interview, Davis elaborates on the importance of systemic change and intersectionality. Davis again reiterates that police killings of Black people are not isolated incidents that can be addressed by convicting individuals. We need to focus on systemic change, which means to rethink what role the police play in society, how violence is a common first response among police officers, and how we can address racism. Mass movements and collective effort play a critical role in effecting systemic change, and Davis does not think “we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do” (35). For example, it was the abolition movement by enslaved people and their decision to join the Union Army that changed the outcome of the Civil War and brought the end of slavery, not a decision by President Lincoln: “[N]o change ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction” (35-36). For this same reason, the election of President Obama did not mean a post-racial era because only mass movements, not one person, can eradicate racism that is embedded within institutions.

Davis believes in the power of learning from other struggles globally through a broader framework of intersectionality. She insists the Black radical tradition encompasses these other struggles, too. Continually connecting your own struggle to other struggles is how we can “engage in the exercise of intersectionality” and thereby help strengthen each movement (45). For instance, when one sees militarized police in Ferguson during protests in the United States, one should think of militarized Israeli police during Palestinian protests. Similarly, a rise in solidarity with Palestine and support for the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement can in turn help increase support for the fight against prison privatization. Radical and antiracist feminist movements are prime examples of how the most effective movements incorporate intersectionality by advocating going beyond just the movements you personally identify with.

Davis concludes by offering words of optimism and encouragement in what keeps her fighting as an activist. She again rejects the capitalist emphasis on the individual and believes that it “is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism” (49).

The fourth section is a transcript of Angela Davis’s speech presented in London on December 13, 2013, about a week after Nelson Mandela’s death. She criticizes society’s “sanctification” of Mandela as a heroic individual despite his consistent rejection of individualism in favor of placing himself as part of the collective struggle for antiapartheid in South Africa. In emphasizing the collective aspect of movements, she encourages support for another antiapartheid struggle¾the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid. Citing Mandela’s solidarity with Palestine, Davis pushes for global solidarity and connecting progressive struggles throughout the world as was done in the 20th century between the Black struggle in the United States, African liberation movements, the Cuban revolution, and people in Vietnam.

Davis draws connections between the struggle against Israeli apartheid and the one against South African apartheid, stating both struggles share “the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubric of terrorism” (53). Like Mandela, who remained on the US terrorist watch list until 2008, and other antiapartheid leaders in South Africa, many Palestinians fighting against Israeli apartheid are labeled as terrorists. Davis calls for support of the BDS movement that was modeled after the antiapartheid movement in South Africa.

Davis again criticizes G4S and details its direct role in the global prison-industrial complex, including some of the following examples: (1) G4S’s private prisons globally; (2) its provision of services to the Israeli police, for checkpoints along the apartheid wall, and to private businesses and homes of Israeli settlers; (3) immigrant detention and deportation in the United States and United Kingdom; and (4) G4S’s involvement in security at US schools, which Davis believes “[helps] blur the boundary between schools and jails” (56). Within this discussion, Davis compares the profit-driven repression and imprisonment of Palestinians to the profit-driven rise of mass incarceration in the United States. She states that the majority of those incarcerated are people of color, with trans people of color most likely to be imprisoned, as she reminds the audience that “[r]acism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex” (59). Davis concludes with a call for international solidarity led by an intersectional perspective and calls for support for “the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall” (60).