Angela Davis Still Believes America Can Change - The New York Times - 0 views
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there’s no love lost between mainstream liberalism and the more so-called radical voices that arose in the ’70s
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Angela Davis survived that dangerous time with her reputation intact, her spirit unbroken and her critical vision of the American free-enterprise system unchanged
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she is to a piercing and radical tradition of struggle in the Black community that has never, as the kids say, “been given their flowers.”
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As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest, Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to shape the future.
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she expresses a relaxed optimism about the country’s direction.
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a professor who has taught history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades,
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Stuart Hall,
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Prudence Crandall
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Anne Braden
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For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.
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But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women
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had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda
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So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?
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She believes narrow definitions of any progressive movement feed a self-centeredness that limits its ability to unify with other groups. In other words, she understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented.
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“Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.
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and Columbia University.
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that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them
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this philosophy is easier to demand from a podium than to write into policy, where efforts have been stymied by self-interest and personal prejudices. But as we discuss her past, I detect no cynicism, no despair nor frustration —
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Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed
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And yet in so much of what they did accomplish — with civil rights, women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the environment and scores of other issues — they have radically shifted America’s expectations and norms.
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Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system
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a reimagining of policing and incarceration has been essential to her vision for decades.
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)
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It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?
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I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il
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but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader
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most left-of-center organizations opposed to the American status quo in the ’60s suffered from some version of the Great Man syndrome, where women were either relegated to support roles or their contributions to the organizations were minimized.
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Fannie Lou Hamer
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Huey P. Newton w
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Mark Rudd
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[Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.
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One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.
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Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi
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all of whom have prevented a cult of personality developing around themselves
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E.D. Nixon,
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Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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Yet “[the boycott] took place because Black women — domestic workers — had the collective imagination to believe that it was possible to change the world, and they were the ones who refused to ride the bus,”
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Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;
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several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.
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the Communist Party supported the struggle against segregation from the 1930s until the Red Scare in the 1950s forced their participation underground. (It’s widely known, for example, that Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington. What is less well remembered is how much the party supported the grass-roots organizing of the S.N.Y.C., along with many activist groups across the nation.)
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Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools
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she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
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From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.
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t was during these expatriate years that Davis began to see the racism she’d experienced growing up as a byproduct of an economy predicated on cheap, exploited labor, identifying institutional racism as a systemic problem long before the phrase came into vogue.
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After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism
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a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers
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Because of her training and time spent abroad, Davis offered a more international vision as she attempted to build connections between oppressed groups, choosing not to separate the African-American struggle from that of other marginalized peoples, such as the Hmong, caught in the violence of the Vietnam War, and the battle against apartheid in South Africa. It’s why, in part, her arrest so resonated across the world.
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In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization; they formed a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
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NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,
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oth forces that have pushed back against the staunchly cis and heteronormative values that have dominated mainstream Black politics.
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Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.
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There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.
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A part of me is glad that we didn’t win the revolution we were fighting for back then, because there would still be male supremacy. There would still be hetero-patriarchy. There would be all of these things that we had not yet come to consciousness about.”
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There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.
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Davis, however, finds those signifiers meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as capitalism remains our secular religion.
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The elephant in the room is always capitalism,”
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Capitalism has always been racial capitalism.
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We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”
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It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.
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Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.
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Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011
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Black Lives Matter movement.
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this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.
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It’s also the kind of organizing that doesn’t always bear fruit quickly.
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there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”
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She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy
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As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.
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AMERICANS ARE TERRIBLE at understanding history.
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We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.
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Davis, though, has never accepted the myth of American exceptionalism. Rather, she has consistently argued that our triumphant narrative of Manifest Destiny is simply a cover for an exploitive financial system that corrupts our public life and represses our humanity