From Black Liberation to Black Studies
After the collapse of the black radical movement, Angela Davis retreated to the permanent refuge of the failed revolutionary: academia.
Over the years, Davis would serve as a professor and lecturer at UCLA, Rutgers, Claremont, Syracuse, Vassar, San Francisco State University, San Francisco Art Institute, and, most permanently, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She had a unique talent for securing the support of the institutions she was revolting against: unlike many of her comrades in the black militant movement, who met their end in the graveyard or the prison yard, Davis was able to successfully maintain her reputation in mainstream society and secure a permanent sinecure from the government she had once promised to overthrow.
The influence of Davis’s long march through academia is profound. When Davis broke down the door of the UCSD registrar’s office as a graduate student, she demanded racial quotas, critical theory, Marxist ideology, and “white studies” to unmask the oppressive nature of European culture, and a general critique of “capitalism in the Western world, including the crucial roles played by colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide.” She wanted a reading list of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, and a curriculum designed to “reject the entire oppressive structure of America.”1
All of this has come into being. Davis’s radical curriculum has become the standard humanities program in the American university. Her political program has become the official platform of the progressive Left. The ideology of the old radicals has been translated into academic language, divided up into various subdisciplines, and reprinted as original insight.
From her perch in academia, Davis created a philosophy that laid the groundwork for the “activist-scholars” who would come to dominate intellectual life in the United States. The Weathermen, Panthers, and BLA attacked the physical symbolism of the United States: the Capitol, the Pentagon, the NYPD, Bank of America. But Davis struck much deeper. She sought to scratch out the origins and the legitimacy of Western society altogether.
As it turned out, the failures of the 1970s were not fatal. Davis and the black militant movement were able to reinvent themselves as an intellectual elite. And they became even more dangerous after laying down their arms.
* * *
Angela Davis’s intellectual conquest began with her first lectures as an assistant professor at UCLA, prior to her incarceration.
The course, which was later published as a pamphlet called Lectures on Liberation, established the ideological formula that served as the foundation of her work for the following fifty years: the legitimacy of identity politics, the subversion of the founding myths, and the need for the total deconstruction of American institutions. From the beginning, Davis presented the world as a Hegelian dialectic between master and slave. She wove together the great themes of consciousness, identity, power, and action, and advanced the argument that only the slave could understand freedom. “The slave finds at the end of his journey towards understanding a real grasp of what freedom means,” she said. “He understands that the master’s freedom is abstract freedom to suppress other human beings. The slave understands that this is a pseudo concept of freedom and at this point is more enlightened than his master for he realizes that the master is a slave of his own misconceptions, his own misdeeds, his own brutality, his own effort to oppress.”2
In Davis’s mind, the master-slave dialectic served as the key to unlocking the principle of equality. She reminded her students that the Greeks invented democracy while also maintaining slavery, a hypocrisy that continued with the American founders. From Athens to Philadelphia, Davis argued, the oppressed, and the black slaves in particular, “have exposed, by their very existence, the inadequacies not only of the practice of freedom, but of its very theoretical formulation.”
The slave, whether in the iron chains of the past or the invisible chains of the present, is the only possible means of discovering freedom. Through his identity and through his consciousness, he is uniquely qualified to escape the one-dimensional society and achieve true liberation. And his only viable path, Davis taught, was action. “The slave is actually conscious of the fact that freedom is not a fact, it is not a given, but rather something to be fought for, it can exist only through a process of struggle.” Through this struggle, she believed, the slave could finally realize Marx’s vision of transforming the “wish-dream of an oppressed humanity” into an immanent, flesh-and-blood reality.3
The first objective of Davis’s new theory of revolution was to establish racial and sexual identity as the basis for political action. Beginning with her prison writings, Davis presented herself and, by extension, the black woman, as the neo-slave, the maroon, the fugitive wading through the swamps—and, by virtue of her identity, the human embodiment of the quest for freedom.
Davis was one of the first to argue that the fight against oppression must include the fight against racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. “The socialist movement must never forget that while the economic struggle is indispensable, it is by no means the sole terrain of significant anti-capitalist activity,” she wrote during her incarceration. The movement must obliterate the entire superstructure that holds the system in place, particularly the architecture of racism and the “family-based structure of oppression.” For Davis, just as minorities must be liberated from racial domination, women must be liberated from the “drudgery of full-time child rearing,” their “containment within the family,” and the “male supremacist structures of the larger society.” By dissolving the social bonds that sustain the mode of production, she believed, the revolutionary could begin to undermine the entire capitalist society.4
The black woman, because of her position at the lowest point of the social hierarchy, provided the ultimate foco for this revolt: she experienced the interlocking oppressions of race, class, and sex all at once, and, as such, was endowed with almost mystical powers of perception, authenticity, and moral standing. For Davis, the fugitive slave women, who “often poisoned the food and set fire to the houses of their masters,”5 provided the historical inspiration for the war of identity in contemporary society. “We, the black women of today, must accept the full weight of a legacy wrought in blood by our mothers in chains,” she wrote. “Our fight, while identical in spirit, reflects different conditions and thus implies different paths of struggle. But as heirs to a tradition of supreme perseverance and heroic resistance, we must hasten to take our place wherever our people are forging on towards freedom.”6 Davis—as the black woman in leg irons, who would later come out as a lesbian—puts herself at the center. The revolution emanates from her very existence.
Davis’s theoretical work on identity had an enormous impact on the development of left-wing politics throughout the era.
In 1977, a group of black lesbian activists working together as the Combahee River Collective followed Davis’s lead and published the landmark Combahee River Collective Statement, which gave birth to the term “identity politics” and operationalized Davis’s unified theory of oppression. “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking,” they wrote. “The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”
Citing Davis’s prison essay on black women, the authors advanced the idea that identity is both the source of their oppression and the basis for their resistance against it. Political consciousness, they said, must begin with personal consciousness and recognition of one’s place in the social hierarchy. “The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated,” they wrote. “There is a very low value placed upon Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. As an early group member once said, ‘We are all damaged people merely by virtue of being Black women.’ We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level.”
But this cage of oppression also contained the key. The program of revolution could begin with an excavation of personal complexes, pathologies, and traumas, which can be transformed into emotional weapons, using the status of the oppressed as a means of establishing credibility and a method of organizing resistance. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” they wrote, coining the phrase that would devour American politics for the next half century. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.”
The Combahee River Collective’s goals were unoriginal: they proposed the old tripartite solution of anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-patriarchy. But their means were revolutionary.
The activists eschewed the masculine inclinations toward violence, system-building, physical power, and the seizure of the means of production, and created a uniquely feminine program that marshalled identity, emotion, trauma, and psychological manipulation in service of their political objectives. The Combahee Statement recast left-wing politics as an identity-based, therapeutic pursuit. The language of the document is strikingly modern: the reconceptualization of the activist organization as “an emotional support group”; sentences that legitimize themselves with “as Black women” or “as Black feminists”; gratuitous capitalization of identity markers such as Black and Lesbian; embarrassing neologisms such as “herstory” instead of “history”; emotional references to “pain,” “joy,” and “sisterhood”; venomous hostility toward white women in particular.7
Despite its shortcomings,8 the Combahee Statement is a triumphant document: a declaration of independence from “white male rule,” using a vocabulary and a method of argumentation that would become commonplace in every corner of American society.9
The next objective in Davis’s project of rationalization was to demolish the founding myths of the United States, which, she believed, would create a predicate for subverting the institutions that maintained the system of racial domination.
Davis’s comrade Eldridge Cleaver outlined the intentions of this gambit in a provocative prison essay, “The White Race and Its Heroes,” in which he argued that, by the late 1960s, the left-wing effort to revise American history had already drawn blood. Americans, Cleaver said, could no longer look back to Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln with a sense of innocent patriotism. Their old champions had been exposed as a lineup of criminals; the past had been untethered from the present and could no longer serve as the national myth.
“What has suddenly happened is that the white race has lost its heroes,” Cleaver wrote. “The new generations of whites, appalled by the sanguine and despicable record carved over the face of the globe by their race in the last five hundred years, are rejecting the panoply of white heroes, whose heroism consisted in erecting the inglorious edifice of colonialism and imperialism; heroes whose careers rested on a system of foreign and domestic exploitation, rooted in the myth of white supremacy and the manifest destiny of the white race.”10
Cleaver understood the power of establishing a mythical void. He declared that the great figures of American life—the Founding Fathers who had established the Republic in the name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—had “acquired new names” and been reduced to a sequence of “slave-catchers, slaveowners, murderers, butchers, invaders, oppressors.”11 Suddenly, Americans who sang the national anthem or stood for the pledge of allegiance began to experience a stirring of doubt. “The racist conscience of America”12 was beginning to break through the protective layers of denial and hypocrisy.
Cleaver had realized that every society has a pantheon of heroes and, if the radicals could tear it down, the pain would become unbearable and men would rush to find new heroes to replace them. “That growing numbers of white youth are repudiating their heritage of blood and taking people of color as their heroes and models is a tribute not only to their insight but to the resilience of the human spirit,” he wrote. “For today the heroes of the initiative are people not usually thought of as white: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tse-tung . . . Ho Chi Minh, Stokely Carmichael, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Forman, Chou En-lai.”13
Davis advanced the same line of attack, presenting slavery as the infinite crucible out of which the United States could never escape. Beginning in her first lectures at UCLA, Davis presented the Founding Fathers as the embodiment of evil, securing their own freedom at the expense of another. “One cannot fail to conjure up the image of Thomas Jefferson and the other so-called Founding Fathers formulating the noble concepts of the Constitution of the United States while their slaves were living in misery,” she said.14
Even Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, could not escape this critique. “Lincoln did not free the slaves,” she said years later.15 “Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery.”16
Moreover, Davis claimed, the regime that Lincoln established through the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished slavery, was not an attempt to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, but a duplicitous scheme to perpetuate the slave system through other means, most notably the prison system. America moved from the “prison of slavery to the slavery of prison,” which was designed to control blacks through the demonstration that “incarceration and penal servitude were their possible fate.”
According to Davis, the progression of American history was not the incremental realization of American ideals. It was the extension of the slave system, using subtler methods. Washington and Jefferson brought the slave state into being. Lincoln transformed it into “a totalitarian effort to control black labor in the post-Emancipation era.”17 Meanwhile, modern America remained trapped in “the myth that the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement freed the second-class citizens.”18
As with Cleaver, Davis’s gambit was to strike at the origins of the nation’s historical memory, to expose its deepest principles as a pack of lies, and to break apart the cultural foundations that ensure its continuity. She understood that to change a nation’s metaphors is to have enormous power over its future. After establishing the premise of American evil, she hoped, the public would be ready to enact its conclusion.
This is the endpoint of Angela Davis’s ideological formula: “abolition.” If one accepts that the United States is rooted in slavery and oppression, and that modern-day black Americans play the role of “neo-slaves,” the only just and reasonable solution is to abolish the social, economic, and political conditions that brought it into being.
It was a shrewd choice of language. By changing the metaphor from “revolution” to “abolition,” Davis was able to wrap her political program in the moral authority of the historical abolitionists while continuing to push for the same left-wing vision. The branding of the campaign changed, but the substance remained the same.
The original foco of the abolitionist program was the carceral system. In the 1960s and ’70s, Davis and Cleaver pursued this policy at human scale. Davis rallied outside prisons to free a revolving lineup of “political prisoners” and worked with the radicals who led the Marin courthouse siege. Cleaver, meanwhile, stood in front of the crowds and called for emptying the prisons altogether. “I call for the freedom of even those who are so alienated from society that they hate everybody. Cats who tattoo on their chest, ‘Born to Hate,’ ‘Born to Lose’ . . . ‘Born to Kill,’” he shouted.19 “Turn them over to the Black Panther Party. Give them to us. We will redeem them from the promises made by the Statue of Liberty that were never fulfilled.”20
Cleaver’s soldiers in the Black Liberation Army put this rhetoric into action. They sent an amphibious escape team to break their comrades out of New York City’s Rikers Island jail and tried to cut through the steel doors of the Manhattan House of Detention with an acetylene torch.21 Later, they succeeded in liberating BLA leader Assata Shakur by smuggling three handguns into New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, holding two guards hostage and escaping in a getaway car.22
In retrospect, these tactics seem preposterous, from another era. But the primitive logic of the jailbreak did not disappear with the collapse of the black radical movement—it merely changed shape. The radicals had lost their faith in the lumpenproletariat holding makeshift knives to the throats of prison guards. Instead, they moved the fight onto the respectable terrain of the intelligentsia and reconceptualized their movement in theoretical terms. The prison escape became “criminal justice reform.” The act of revolt became “racial justice.”
In the hands of the intellectuals, the prison, once the physical recruiting ground for the Black Panther Party, became the metaphor for the broader society and the justification for its destruction.
If anything, the shift from concrete to abstract made the abolitionist program even more ambitious. Davis and her comrades began to call not for the release of individual criminals, but for the abolition of the entire system. “There are vast numbers of people behind bars in the United States—some two and a half million—and imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education,” Davis explained.23 “At this moment in the history of the US I don’t think that there can be policing without racism. I don’t think that the criminal justice system can operate without racism. Which is to say that if we want to imagine the possibility of a society without racism, it has to be a society without prisons.”24 And once the prisons are eliminated, she believed, the other institutions would follow.
All of this was happening in the shadows. While most Americans considered the black nationalist revolution a dead letter, its leading figures were busy revising their ideology and creating a new ground for revolt. From academia, Angela Davis devised a new formula that transformed the movement’s violent impulses into a comprehensive academic theory. All they needed was a method of legitimation—and a new basis for rebuilding their power.
* * *
After the disintegration of their movement during the Nixon years, the black radicals converged on a new strategy: the long march through the universities.
Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panther Party had shaped this movement from the very beginning. In the late 1960s, Davis and Cleaver had both secured teaching positions in the University of California system, despite the efforts of Governor Reagan and the Board of Regents. Davis was a full-time professor, while Cleaver was engaged by UC Berkeley to teach a one-time course called Social Analysis 139X, which christened the birth of the university’s “Black Experience” program and served as an initial model for black studies departments, which would soon be established across the country.25
At Berkeley, Cleaver lectured on the “roots of racism” and, although he refrained from using his signature expletives, delighted left-wing students with pugnacious rhetoric and situated violence as an element of political expression.26 “Robbery, Rape, Political Organizing, Escaping, Rebellion, Murder,” he wrote on the blackboard.27
That same year, Cleaver told students at UCSD and UCLA that their education would have to be demolished down to the foundations.28 “We have to close the book on every page of American history up until this moment because it is all written in blood, in corruption, in inhumanity, and there are no guidelines to guide us to the future,” he said. “The incidents are there, the history is there, but it’s not the history of the people. It’s the history of the pigs, for the pigs, by the pigs.”
The solution, according to Cleaver, was to dust off the books of Karl Marx—“A smart, smart cat”—and apply the “universal principles of socialism” to the American regime, using any means necessary. “The people have no need to stand in fear and trembling of public servants,” he said. “You can kill us, but you’ll have to sneak up on us because if you shoot at us, we are going to shoot back.”29
After gaining this initial foothold, the black radical movement sought to convert the universities into a more durable power center. Rather than individual professorships and one-off lectures, they wanted their own departments, their own curricula, and their own academic programs, which could legitimize and promote black nationalist ideology.
Their first target was San Francisco State University.
In the late 1960s, Cleaver and his comrades in the Black Panther Party helped students at SF State organize as the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, a nod to the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These groups hosted rallies, fought with police, occupied campus buildings, went on strike, and released a list of demands to administrators, including the creation of a permanent School of Ethnic Studies, the hiring of fifty left-wing professors, automatic admission for minority students, and the retention of the Black Panther Party’s minister of education, George Murray, as a faculty member for minority students.30
From the outside, Cleaver rallied students with a call to resist “bone-nosed Nixon, all those jive-assed Regents, [and] all the equivocating pigs of the power structure that need to be in the penitentiary or up against the wall.”31 He told them they needed a “a new history book” that “recognizes that there is a cultural revolution going on in this country.”32
The campaign was remarkably successful. Within a few years, the coalition opened a student-led Experimental College and, through an agreement with the administration following the strike, secured automatic admission for nonwhite students and established the nation’s first ethnic studies and black studies programs, with courses such as “History of the Third World,” “Sociology of Black Oppression,” and “Black Nationalism.”33
From the outset, these programs were shaped by the activism and ideology of the Black Panther Party, which skillfully used inside-outside pressure tactics to muscle the universities into submission. “The Black Panthers were a tremendous influence on what happened at San Francisco State, with many of the members of the Black Student Union being early members of the party,” explained Jason Ferreira, the current chair of SF State’s Race and Resistance Studies Department. “So there’s an intimate relationship between the [Black Student Union] and the Black Panther Party.”34
This movement to connect black nationalist ideology with administrative power in the universities spread rapidly from the campus of San Francisco State.
By the mid-1970s, there were upwards of five hundred black studies programs in universities across the country. Activists had established the technique and replicated it everywhere.35 As the sociologist Fabio Rojas has documented, once the black militants had realized their campaign for guerrilla warfare was doomed, they shifted with full force to a strategy of institutional capture. “The black studies movement is an example of a social movement targeting bureaucracies,” Rojas writes. “The black studies movement proponents clearly understood that inside the university system would allow them to project their message. Using sociologist Ed Shils’s phrasing, activists thought ‘the power of the ruling class derives from its incumbency of its central institutional system’ and acted to appropriate some of that power for themselves.”36
These departments, however, were not models of academic rigor.37 According to the black scholar Shelby Steele, who had once worked in the movement to establish black studies departments, the programs were filled were “crooks” and “hustlers” who were more interested in obtaining lucrative sinecures than in doing meaningful academic work. Steele describes a vivid cast of characters that populated the new departments: a street hustler driving to campus in a brand-new Mercedes-Benz; a program administrator who was functionally illiterate but could play the manipulation game; a virulently racist department director who slandered whites as cold, sadistic “ice people.”
But the universities, captured by a spirit of “white guilt,” rushed to meet their demands. “I came to see that we had no future that way. That we had no respect, we had no methodology, we had no discipline,” Steele recalled. “I came to see very quickly that this was an avenue for minorities to gain the economic security of the university professorship. They had no real credentials, so their argument became ‘You have to hire me to do this because I’m black.’”38
Today, the discipline of black studies has been universalized: 91 percent of public universities have black studies programs and 42 percent have solidified them into full-time academic departments.39 The black liberation movement may have disintegrated, but over time its ideology has been softened, adapted, and absorbed into the academic bureaucracy.
The concepts for these departments were ready-made. The Combahee River Collective had codified the theory of “identity politics.”40 Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael had created the concept of “institutional racism.”41 Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver had popularized the concept of the “white power structure.”42 Angela Davis popularized the phrases “police brutality,” “social inequities,” “disproportionate representation,” and “prison-industrial complex.”43 Her mentor Herbert Aptheker coined the term “anti-racism.”44 Over the decades, this language escaped from the pages of the Black Panther newsletter and the BLA communiqué and legitimized itself through the organs of prestige knowledge-formation.
This set of once-radical ideas has now achieved intellectual mass. The academic journal databases yield 609,000 results for “identity politics,” 107,000 results for “anti-racism,” 92,000 results for “institutional racism,” 72,000 results for “black power,” 18,000 results for “prison-industrial complex,” 11,000 results for “white power structure,” and 4,000 results for “prison abolition.”45 And the popular newspapers and magazines have adopted this language wholesale. The New York Times now speaks of the “white power structure.” The Washington Post contemplates “institutional racism.” Vanity Fair puffs itself for “prison abolition.”46
But there is a question that looms underneath the language of the Left: What do they want?
The original black nationalists made their demands explicit: the violent overthrow of the United States; the establishment of a new Marxist-Leninist regime; the execution of law enforcement officers; the creation of a black ethnostate in the American South called the Republic of New Afrika.47 These elaborate fantasies were ultimately unsustainable. The urban guerrillas’ foco theory was pulverized by events. Their brightly colored bubas and dashikis have passed with the change of fashion. Nevertheless, after shedding the trappings of political extremism and symbolic excess, the central preoccupations of the original movement have survived.
In fact, they are more powerful than ever. The demands of the Third World Liberation Front have become the reality in nearly all of the public universities. The prison breaks and calls for mass decarceration have been formalized as “criminal justice reform.” The theory of identity politics has permanently changed left-wing activism.
This transition from “black power to black studies” is best understood as a process of rationalization. The second generation of activists and intellectuals learned from the failures of the past and worked to gain influence within the established institutions. They now wear business casual instead of tribal robes and submit travel reimbursements rather than ransom demands. But the basic ideology, having passed through the process of rationalization, is strikingly consistent over time. When Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver laid out the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, they demanded affirmative action, universal basic income, racialist ideology in schools, an expansive welfare state, and that the black criminal, once derided as part of “the scum layer of society,” become the new moral center.
This remains the functioning ideology of the black studies movement and has been absorbed into the legislative agenda of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. “In many ways, the demands of the BPP’s Ten-Point Program are just as relevant—or perhaps even more relevant—as during the 1960s, when they were first formulated,” Angela Davis reminisced in 2014. “I think of the Black Power movement—or what we referred to at the time as the Black liberation movement—as a particular moment in the development of the quest for Black freedom.”48
In one sense, the movement has achieved its goals. The United States has created a sprawling welfare state, with massive outlays for jobs, housing, health, education, and direct support. The universities have installed affirmative action and racialist pedagogy as key pillars of their administrative programs. The largest public school districts have created policies and curricula to advance “anti-racism.”49 Blue cities have turned the black criminal into an object of moral reverence and begun the process of “decarceration, decriminalization, and depolicing.”50
The goal of substantive equality, however, has remained elusive. The black radicals might have captured the institutions, but they have not yet overturned the basic structures of society.51
In a speech at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2013, Davis acknowledged this deficit, reading out the items of the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program and reminding students that it still represented the unfinished work of the revolution. “Number one was ‘We want freedom.’ Two, full employment. Three, an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities—it was anticapitalist!” Davis exclaimed. “We want an immediate end to police brutality. . . . We want freedom for all Black and oppressed people now held in US federal, state, county, city, and military prisons and jails. . . . We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community control of modern technology.”52
The demands had never changed. The radicals wanted to realize Marcuse’s utopia. They wanted to create a world beyond scarcity, abolishing not only racism but the constraints of human nature itself.
The students at Birkbeck could see that Davis was growing old. She had retired from UC Santa Cruz a few years earlier.53 Her voice had lost the forceful staccato that had characterized her earlier speeches. She contained the entire dialectical transformation within the progression of her own life, from her first demonstration in support of Lumumba-Zapata College at UCSD to the disappointments of the subsequent decades.
But still she believed. She saw the revolution waiting for her at long last. And she was searching for the spark.