TOWARD TRANSNATIONAL
MOVEMENTS FOR JUSTICE
January 28, 2021
Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UCSC, is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad. Over the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era. Davis emerged as a leading activist in the 1960s in the Communist Party USA and had close relations with the Black Panther Party. During the past fifty years, she has continued to be at the cutting edge of radical thought, prison abolition, and movement organizing. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance,1 a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex as the system that links government with industry and drives the proliferation of prisons and prisoners.2 Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison. Her works include Women, Race and Class (1981), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (2012), Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016), and Abolition. Feminism. Now., with Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie (2022).
ILAN PAPPÉ: Angela, it is a great pleasure and honor to have you with us. Your stance, career, and courage are a model for how to fuse activism with scholarship, and moral commitment with professionalism—without fear and without caving to intimidation and persecution. We confront this pressure sometimes at the European Centre for Palestine Studies due to our principles, values, and moral stances, and I know that you face it regularly as a scholar and activist. Everyone would love us to begin our conversation with your thoughts about what happened in the United States on Capitol Hill on the 6th of January 2021. What is your assessment of this event and how do you contextualize it in America today? What does it mean for the future?
ANGELA Y. DAVIS: First of all, let me tell you, Ilan, what an honor it is to finally meet you after reading your work and following your career. To venture a response to your question, I would begin by saying that I was shocked, of course, by this display of organized white supremacist violence. But I cannot say that I was entirely surprised. I interpret this attempted insurrection instigated by the 45th president of the United States during the last days of his office as a desperate attempt to turn the tide of history. Not only to reverse the recent election results, but to reverse decades of struggle against racism that have yielded very important victories.
The insurrectionists and many Trump supporters around the country have been persuaded by the demagogy of the last four years that white people have necessarily suffered as a result of progress in the struggles for justice for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color. In other words, they interpret what we see as the beginning of racial justice to be white oppression. They assume that communities of color can only move forward if white people are relegated to positions historically occupied by Black people and other people of color. But they fail to recognize that when Black people achieve progress, it almost always means better conditions for poor white people. They misread the increasing impoverishment of white people by failing to recognize the destructive impact of capitalism— global capitalism, racial capitalism. And in that context, we recently learned that the wealth of billionaires in this country has increased tremendously during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we already know, their total wealth is two-thirds higher than the wealth held by the bottom half of the population. So I just want to say parenthetically that Naomi Klein’s analysis of disaster capitalism helps us to understand what is happening here.3 To conclude this answer, I would say that the insurrection on January 6th was a microcosmic representation of the failed efforts to turn back the clock. Not only with respect to challenges to racism, but also patriarchy, transphobia, climate justice, and the assaults on the working class. It seems to me that it represented a desperate effort to return to a time when racism, misogyny, environmental pollution, and all of this represented the uncontested foundation of our social realities.
ILAN PAPPÉ: It’s very important that you mentioned the notion that this is a “zero-sum” game. If an oppressed group gains more privileges, or rights rather than privileges, and it is not perceived as a win-win situation. We see this also on the ground in Palestine, where most Israeli Jews think that any enhancement or improvement in Palestinian rights means that their own rights will be diminished. This is important for many of us.
As you say, white supremacism was at the heart of this attack on Capitol Hill. In the whirlwind of the two days that followed, many Palestinians who live in America noticed Nancy Pelosi’s speech, which she opened by referring to an Israeli poet. In our struggle to make America a place where the Palestinian narrative is heard, where the case of Palestine is not ignored, we could not miss this. Pelosi started her speech by quoting Ehud Manor, who wrote a poem about his loyalty to the white Israeli settler colonialist state despite feeling uncertain about its actions. She then went on to mention her visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel.
If you listened to Pelosi, you would have thought that a group of antisemites and anti-Zionists had attacked Capitol Hill—this was the essence of it.
The appearance of the Israeli narrative and Israel’s supporters in the Democratic Party is worrying. When President Obama was elected, one of the first venues he went to was to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Even in that dramatic moment in America’s life, Israel and its supporters were there.
ANGELA Y. DAVIS: As you know, the political establishment in the United States, the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party, is closely linked to Zionism. But let me begin by making another point. It is very important to identify connections between anti-Black racism and antisemitism. And it is important to remember the historical alliances that brought Black and Jewish communities together to speak out against the violence that was inflicted on both communities by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils. Growing up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, which was the most segregated city in the US, I remember that when Black churches were bombed, Jewish synagogues were also bombed. I want to be clear about the importance of making that connection. But at the same time, I think that Nancy Pelosi is probably reluctant to acknowledge the fact that charges of antisemitism have been tied to critiques of the state of Israel in existing political discourse. These historical linkages of racism and antisemitism are not recognized in the way they should be.
Under the occupation of Palestine by the state of Israel, Palestinians suffer forms of oppression that are akin to the ways in which Black people have been treated in the US. I’ve been following the case of the killing of Ahmad Erekat, who is the cousin of my friend and comrade Noura Erakat. His killing is so reminiscent of the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—he was killed as he was raising his hands. We all remember the slogan, “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”
It seems that these historical alliances and recognitions of the kinship between anti-Black racism, white supremacy, antisemitism need to be brought to the fore in a way that also highlights the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the dispossession of the Palestinian people, and the deep kinship of Zionism and racism. We really need to challenge the efforts to define antisemitism as a critique of the state of Israel.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Let me move ahead to another topic. You have devoted your life to the struggle for equality—not only for African Americans, but also women, workers, and marginalized and oppressed groups. And not only in the United States. One of your comments after the murder of George Floyd and widespread activity by the Movement for Black Lives really interested me. You said that you were encouraged by the reaction among the white community to this particular crime. And as we know, the reaction went all over the world.
Does this reaction signify a fundamental change in attitudes toward African Americans in the US? And if it is a change, how deep does it go? I was surprised at how that crime seemed to catch the attention of white people, not only in the United States. Is it a sign of encouragement, rather than a superficial reaction? Is it something more fundamental in your eyes?
ANGELA Y. DAVIS: Yes, I was really encouraged by the fact that in the aftermath of the lynching of George Floyd and the police killing of Breonna Taylor, more white people participated in antiracist demonstrations than ever before in the entire history of this country. That was very heartening. But we know that the majority of white people voted for the 45th occupant of the White House— and the majority of white women voted for him. So I was encouraged and at the same time deeply disappointed. But it seems to me that those mass mobilizations that took place after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor represented a kind of collective coming to consciousness about structural racism that has been long overdue.
For too long racism has been regarded as an individual flaw, a defect that can be removed by learning how not to express racist attitudes or use racist language. And the focus has been on distinguishing oneself as not a racist. How many times have we heard the phrase, “I am not a racist”? How many times have we heard the phrase, “I don’t see race”? Or I’ve had people tell me, “Well, I don’t think of you as a Black person.” These efforts to challenge racism have been so overdetermined by an individualist approach that is connected to neoliberal ideologies and capitalist approaches. It has been very difficult to create a public discourse about institutional and structural racism—about racism that is deeply embedded in the structures of policing, incarceration, health care, education, and housing. So, my analysis of what happened in May is that the collective witnessing of the murder of George Floyd amounted to something similar to the audience of a lynching.
Because we all saw that video. We saw the last eight minutes of his life. And we were all aware that everyone else was watching. In the historical lynching parties, white people were supposed to be amused by watching the slow death of a Black person, which happened over and over in the aftermath of Reconstruction Era in the latter 1800s and early 1900s. And it seems to me that that moment when we were watching the death of George Floyd and aware of the fact that we were part of a large collective witnessing, it allowed for the emergence of a new consciousness—and not automatically or spontaneously, because this consciousness has been cultivated by young activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. We can go back to the movements that began in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the failure to hold other vigilante murderers accountable.
It is important to point out that activists and academics have been using the notion of structural racism for many decades, but it was superseded in popular discourse by the concept of racism as simply a trait of the individual. This is why people could argue that we were entering into a “post-racial era” when Obama was elected to the office of the presidency. I think it’s also important to remember that we were at the beginning of the pandemic then, and the most striking example of structural racism was the fact that disproportionate numbers of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx people were being infected and dying from COVID-19. Those police killings helped to consolidate a popular awareness of structural racism and its impact on policing. And therefore I remain optimistic that it is possible to build on that collective recognition and begin to develop strategies that specifically target structural racism in all of these institutions.
ILAN PAPPÉ: The prison system is a particularly heinous and callous side of institutional racism in the United States that attracted your attention, especially the crimes of sterilization and incarceration. You are a great advocate for both defunding the police and abolition, which are the most difficult challenges for anyone facing institutional racism. This also resonates with many people in Britain who feel that the prison system is probably the most hidden and yet the most brutal side of institutional racism, even if racism is more visible in the police force or in their daily encounters with authority.
I wonder whether you feel any hope for the Biden administration regarding these particularly ugly and cruel manifestations of institutional racism as they appear in the prison system. Even without being experts, many of us outside the United States are familiar with and horrified by the prison system, including its neoliberal aspects. The privatization of the US prison system adds a sinister aspect to an already brutal system. Do you have any hope for the Biden administration? Or any hope at all without the Biden administration?
ANGELA Y. DAVIS: First of all, I am glad that at least for the moment, we were able to use the electoral system to defeat the onslaught of fascism. At the same time, Biden’s past positions don’t necessarily give me hope, nor do [Kamala] Harris’s positions. But I do believe that they are more susceptible to the kind of pressure emanating from organized movements than the previous president. So I do have hope—but I don’t simply have hope in the Biden administration. I have hope in the fact that that there are so many young people who ally themselves with politically radical and progressive positions. My hope is that we will continue to put pressure on those in office. Of course, we need to remember that Biden was one of the main architects of the 1994 Crime Bill, which is in part responsible for the emergence of what we call “mass incarceration.”
It was good to see that the day before yesterday Biden issued an executive order which ends contracts with private prison companies. But it is important to point out that we challenge and stand up against the privatization of prisons not because we think that a prison system that is not privatized will work—but rather the privatization of prisons represents the role that capitalism has played in the development of a racist-inspired mass incarceration system. Federal prisons make up a pretty small fraction of the US prison system. And private prison companies run about twelve federal prisons that house about nine percent of all federal prisoners.4 Simply ending contracts with private prison companies is not going to bring major transformations. An overwhelming majority of the more than two million people who are incarcerated in the US are in state, county, and local prisons or jails, and jails and prisons in Indian Country. They are also in immigrant detention facilities.
Private prisons house about eight percent of all incarcerated people. That is important, especially for those of us who are trying to point out the economic dimension of mass incarceration and the way in which it is linked to global capitalism and the deindustrialization processes that took people’s jobs, access to housing and health care, and the dismantling of the welfare state. All of that is so important to understanding the pivotal role that capitalism has played in the production of such a huge carceral system. But simply targeting private prisons will not fundamentally change anything else. Because we actually see privatization within state-owned and -run facilities— the privatization of health care, goods and services, companies that provide meals, and the companies that provide the appliances that prisoners order.
So simply ending contracts with private prisons does not in any way begin to disrupt the relationship of prisons, the carceral system, to the system of global capitalism. There hasn’t been structural change. And I think that the structural change can come. It can come from an insistence on abolition that is made by organized groups of people who are resisting. Let me tell you, Ilan, that I’ve been writing about abolition, along with many other people, since the 1970s. In 1971, the prisoners staged an uprising at Attica—a radical uprising in which they called for abolition. And since then, we developed a very strong abolitionist movement. Particularly a movement that recognizes the importance of gender and the connections with movements to challenge sexual violence.
But I never imagined that abolitionist discourse would enter the mainstream in my lifetime. I remember the way we talked about abolition as if it were so far in the future that we would never witness this kind of moment where there is serious engagement with the question of creating new modes of addressing health, safety, and security—that’s what the movement to defund the police and abolish prisons is all about. It’s about imagining and developing new institutions that can better address the question of safety and security in our society.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Speaking of hope and capitalism and its impact, perhaps it is a good moment to talk a little bit about the left. We have something in common in our biographies: we both were members of the Communist Party. Despite the differences between the United States and historical Palestine, one common feature troubles people who are on the left—and not just in the United States or Palestine. And this is all about the relationship between the wish to push forward a wholesale social revolution, with the stress on class consciousness and determination on the one hand, and the focus on identity politics on the other. The realization that a wider coalition is needed for the making of a more just, egalitarian society. This is a politics of identification.
In Palestine, and in particular in Israel, it is a search to connect not only the Palestinian victims of Zionism but also the Jewish ones (for instance the Ethiopian Jews and North African Jews) and the working class with the overall struggle for a democratic state that would be part of the Arab world and not a bastion of the West. But it has not worked very well because nationalism, religious fanaticism, and politics of identity stand in the way.
You have always struggled for a politics of identification in the USA. Right now, we see how neoliberal capitalist regimes have utterly failed to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic—the whole system is unable to cope without some sort of social welfare policy and nationalization. They cannot even begin to deal with both the economic crisis and the health crisis. This is a moment when the left must go back to its basic challenges and ask, “This time, can we have a stronger agenda that connects the different struggles locally, but also internationally?” And I hope that like me, you feel there are indications that this is possible. The question is, will we be able to exhaust this opportunity that history has given us? What are the chances of enhancing or even achieving this in the future?
ANGELA Y. DAVIS: First, many activists in the Black Lives Matter movement, and in other movements that focus specifically on racial justice, recognize that racial justice is inconceivable without the prospect of economic transformation and an end to capitalism. I still believe that revolutionary transformation absolutely requires a thoroughgoing challenge to capitalism. And some of us have never seen the struggle against racism separately from the struggle against capitalism. There are those who simply assume that bringing Black people higher up on the economic ladder—that is to say incorporating, diversifying the capitalist leadership—will bring about an end to racism. But regardless of who is at the helm of these efforts, whether it’s white people or people of color, the structure remains the same. And I think that it’s important to recognize that class consciousness is always linked to race and gender. I really like Stuart Hall’s formulation: “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” And I am also heartened by the fact that increasing numbers of people are beginning to use the term that was introduced by Cedric Robinson. That is to say “racial capitalism”—that capitalism has always been in relation to racism. That colonialism and slavery are at the very foundations of the development of capitalism, the primitive accumulation about which Marx writes. And so the challenge is to keep these things in tension, to recognize that they are not separate struggles. For too long, the left has assumed that the struggle to end capitalism is a white working-class struggle.
The working class has been largely defined as white in Europe and in the US. And struggles against racism have been assumed to only occupy the terrain of civil rights. Now we’re recognizing that not only must the struggle against racism be central to challenges to capitalism, but challenges to racism cannot really move in a radical direction without also challenging capitalism. So I’m thinking about the trajectory of movements over the last period, during the first decades of the twenty-first century—let’s not forget that it was the Occupy movement that began to demonstrate that it was possible to develop large, massive movements that were not necessarily organized in the way they were before.
It is essential to realize that the major struggles for democracy that have been effective, at least in this part of the world, have been initiated by Black people and people of color. To simply relegate these struggles to identity politics is not helpful. Everyone benefits when Black people make demands that allow us to move forward— not only other people of color and not only white progressive people, but the white people who assume that in order for their lives to matter, Black lives have to be snuffed out. I think that we’re in the process of reconsolidating a left movement. The left does not look like it used to—it has very new faces.
It has been essential for us here in the US who are involved in these struggles to be able to learn from the Palestinian struggles. I can’t emphasize enough that this current moment in our movement against racism has been in many ways assisted by Palestinian activists. I’m referring to the fact that in 2014, when the Ferguson protest happened, it was Palestinians and Palestine who provided the first example of international solidarity with Black movements unfolding here. As such, Palestinians were in the leadership of a global movement of solidarity.
And we’ve also learned so much about the importance of broadening our notion of carcerality—you’ve pointed out that Palestine is the largest prison in the world. How do we engage in struggles for abolition in this country while recognizing that oftentimes methods that are used to decarcerate actually spread carcerality in the community along trajectories that are very dangerous? We have a great deal of gratitude to our Palestinian comrades, sisters, and brothers for their work in Palestine, but also for assisting us to become more radical in our understanding of what it is we are doing.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Absolutely. I was deeply moved watching how during the attack on Gaza, people demonstrated in solidarity with Ferguson. It was amazing. We are nearing the end of our conversation, but I want to pose one last question about academic scholarship and activism. We have many young graduate students and undergraduate students with us, especially those who work on issues such as Palestine, Black history, or decolonization. They are fusing scholarship with activism, and quite often they encounter criticism, prejudice, and hostile attitudes—all under the guise that what they’re doing is not professional enough, that it is biased or not objective.
You and I have both faced our share of such criticism over the years. Like you, I have great faith in the younger generation. But we need to articulate the message for the next generation that academia is not a separate space in the moral struggle for a just society. And this is not easy. From your experience, and may I say also from mine, there is a personal price one might pay for being an outspoken person in academia on moral issues that counter mainstream attitudes, policies, and prejudices. We know the intimidation, the rules of the game. How can we ensure that the next generation does not relent in the face of this pressure? Do you see hope for moral activism within the scholarly community, or the continuation of “organic intellectuals,” as Antonio Gramsci would put it?
ANGELA Y. DAVIS: I would begin by saying that even as we are critical of existing structures of education, including higher education, education matters. Knowledge matters. We cannot engage in successful efforts for radical transformation without knowledge. But at the same time, it’s important for university-trained academics to recognize that knowledge is produced in many sites—not only the university. In this current moment in the US, when we are engaged in serious conversations about defunding the police and abolishing prisons, many of the ideas were first formulated by people who were incarcerated at the time they began to reflect on abolitionist principles.
Over the last few years I’ve been involved in the creation of “critical prison studies,” an interdisciplinary field that has been embraced by increasing numbers of young scholars. And they recognize that the foundational knowledge of that field comes from people in prison themselves. I think it is important to demystify the process of producing knowledge, and at the same time recognize that scholar-activists need the training and exposure to ideas that the university can offer. But it also means that one must learn how to take advantage of these institutions of education and simultaneously be critical of them. The university is not unlike other terrains of struggle; we have to hold in tension our critiques of the institution and the training and knowledge practices that are offered to us.
I’m very excited because I think that this generation of young scholars is more equipped to engage in addressing the problems of the globe—for example, environmental justice and, of course, racism and heteropatriarchy. I’ve taught for many, many years in a feminist studies department and there’s still a great deal of tension, particularly within academic feminism. But we’ve seen the emergence of theories and practices of feminism that disassociate themselves from the old notion that in order to be free, women simply have to try to rise up the ladder and puncture the glass ceiling. We see a feminism that is antiracist, that is anticapitalist, that explores intersectionalities. This is the feminism we need now. It’s not always the feminism one sees at the university, but one witnesses the struggles and the tensions and the contradictions—and that is the context within which we always work.