Angela Davis on Modern Activism
We continue our educational exploration into the life and work of activist and revolutionary Black woman, Angela Davis:
“If anyone is qualified to make an assessment on the current situation, it is Davis. She has spent five decades as an intellectual campaigning for racial justice, yet the causes she has pursued – prison reform, defunding the police, restructuring the bail system – had, until recently, been considered too radical for mainstream political thinking. There was a feeling that she was frozen in time; that she belonged to a 60s brand of so-called radical chic and that her ideas were outmoded. In a profile written in 2016, a Wall Street Journal interviewer asked colleagues if they knew who Davis was. No one under 35 did.
Davis may have become a pinup for social justice 50 years after she rose to prominence, but she insists she gets just as much out of the new generation of protesters and political thinkers. “I see these young people who are so intelligent, who have learned from the past and who have developed new ideas,” she says. “I find myself learning a great deal from people who are 50 years younger than me. And to me, that’s exciting. That keeps me wanting to remain in the struggle.”
“I think it’s really important to point out that, while the immensity of this response is new, the struggles are not new,” she says. Davis doesn’t want the impact of community organising, educational workshops and food banks – the grassroots work pioneered by the Black Panthers in the 60s – to be ignored now. “The struggles have been unfolding for a long time,” she adds. “What we are seeing now bears witness to the work that people have been doing that has not necessarily received media attention.”
Davis cites the militarisation of the US police after Vietnam, and the potential for prison reform after the Attica prison uprising in 1971, which did not materialise, at least not in the way she imagined. Prison populations in the US exploded from around 200,000 at the time of Attica to over a million prisoners by the mid-90s. “Looking back at that period, we realised that the reforms actually helped to consolidate the institution itself and to make it more permanent,” she says. “And that is the fear right now.”
So what advice would she give the Black Lives Matter movement? “The most important thing from where I stand is to begin to give expression to ideas about what we can do next,” she says.
This is, of course, a big question, and a harder one to answer in the heat of growing protests around the world. One thing Davis is clear on is that moments such as the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis or the removal of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol aren’t the ultimate answer. “Regardless of what people think about it, it’s really not going to bring about change,” she says of the statue’s removal. “It’s organising. It’s the work. And if people continue to do that work, and continue to organise against racism and provide new ways of thinking about how to transform our respective societies, that is what will make the difference.”
It’s not just Davis’s ideas on police reform and social justice that are taking hold; her ideas on how that change comes about are proving equally influential. For decades, she has promoted feminist thinking that pushes back against hypermasculine political leadership and forms of resistance. She thinks the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, which have not put an emphasis on or – in some cases – even formed recognisable leadership groups, are breaking new ground.
“There are those here in this country who are asking: ‘Where is the contemporary Martin Luther King?’, ‘Where is the new Malcolm X?’, ‘Where is the next Marcus Garvey?’” says Davis. “And, of course, when they think about leaders, they think about black male charismatic leaders. But the more recent radical organising among young people, which has been a feminist kind of organising, has emphasised collective leadership.”
But isn’t there a tension between Davis’s ideals of collectivity and her own status? “I can’t take myself too seriously,” she says. “I say that over and over again. Because none of this would have happened if it were only up to me as an individual. It was the movement and the impact of the movement.”
Davis has tried to pull that movement into the mainstream before. She ran for office herself in 1980, as the vice-presidential candidate for the US Communist party. In a lecture in 2006, she despaired at the George W Bush administration, and now she can’t even bring herself to say Trump’s name, instead opting for “the current resident of the White House”. Does she think US democracy at present has room for radical ideas about social change? “I don’t think it can happen,” says Davis. “Not with the leadership of the current political formations – not the Democrats, and certainly not the Republican party.”
But what about the Democrats taking a knee and wearing kente cloth in solidarity? Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats wore the Ghanaian fabric, which was given to them by the Congressional Black Caucus, to show “solidarity” with African Americans, a crucial voter base that their presidential candidate, Joe Biden, is struggling to connect with. “That was because they want to be on the right side of history,” Davis says, dismissively. “Not necessarily because they’re going to do the right thing.”
Davis sometimes tells a story at her lectures about how, as a young child in Birmingham, she asked her mother why she couldn’t go to the segregated amusement park or libraries. Her mother, who was an activist before her, explained how segregation worked, but didn’t leave it there. “She continually told us that things would change,” says Davis. “And that they would change, and that we could be a part of that change. So I learned as a child to live under racial segregation, but at the same time simultaneously, to live in an imagined new world and to recognise that things would not always be as they were.”
“My mother always said to us: ‘This is not the way things are supposed to be, this is not the way the world is supposed to be.’”
(From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/angela-davis-on-george-floyd-as-long-as-the-violence-of-racism-remains-no-one-is-safe)
