Freedom Is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

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In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y.

Contents Foreward / Cornel West -- Introduction / Frank Barat -- Progressive struggles against insidious capitalist individualism -- Ferguson reminds us of the importance of a global context -- We have to talk about systematic change -- On Palestine, G4S, and the prison-industrial complex -- Closures and continuities -- From Michael Brown to Assata Shakur, the racist state of America persists -- The Truth Telling Project: violence in America -- Feminism and abolition: theories and practices for the twenty-first century -- Political activism and protest from the 1960s to the age of Obama -- Transnational solidarities Summary In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. It has been so thoroughly commoditized that many people don't even know how to understand the very process of acquiring knowledge because it is subordinated to the future capacity to make money. Of particular relevance to the readership of this journal, Davis points to connections drawn by activists around the exercise of militarized police power in Palestine, and in places like Ferguson, where protests against the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014 achieved sustained intensity, right down to the fact that the same brand of tear gas canister is being used against protesters in each place. This influence is transnational and unspecific to regions or territories but, more so, it represents the long reach of capital and its ability to cultivate systems of violence that can be seen across the planet. But the ways in which she brings to light connections between various freedom movements across the world is powerful.This is our challenge: finding a way to guarantee self determination and equal rights without partitioning the land. Through the series of her collected interviews and speeches, one can imagine an overhaul of division, and seek another world in which is possible. I use three different library systems, and between them ONE library had a few of her books, and this was the only one available in the next 6 months. In this way, she re-accents the important black feminist concept of intersectionality, amplifying its attention to crosscutting dimensions of race, class, gender, and sexual domination at individual and communal scales, with an equal and insistent emphasis upon the international, transnational, and imperial lineaments of power that egalitarian, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist movements and struggles face in the present moment. In a clear and concise manner, she embodies and enacts “intersectionality” – a structural intellectual and political response to the dynamics of violence, White Supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperial policies.

Her message solidifies transnational solidarity regarding anti-blackness, feminism, anti-militarization and other forms of state-institutional-violence. It's very accessible, told either in the form of conversations with Frank Barat or through various transcripts of speeches Davis gave around 2013-2015. Other cookies are used for Advertisement and Analytics (Sharing on social networks, video playing, analysis and statistics, personalized advertising .If Davis would pay more attention to Israel, she'd know that Israeli-Arabs/48 Palestinians have been begging the Israeli government for more policing, not less. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement.

Davis]: Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit.Davis illuminates connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. It is sometimes incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and definitive destruction of a race or people.

Though my interest waned towards the end, it was because I read it all at once instead of over time. It's wild that this was published in 2015 because so many things she talks about feel even more relevant now. Over the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fault lines of inequality that run deep throughout the world. Racism is extant not necessarily because of individual actors but because it is so deeply ingrained in the system. Angela Davis wants us to recognize how the prison-industrial complex is connected to oppressed people in Palestine.And this idea that the militarization of American police came from Israel is laughable because Israeli police aren't militarized.