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

Product Information

Davis’s book hinges on the parallels of the struggles in Ferguson and Palestine to illustrate the necessity of transnational solidarity between movements. At one point Davis is “critical in a friendly way” of Michelle Alexander’s important book “The New Jim Crow” for not incorporating a global framework. Davis suggests that without this global understanding, it is difficult to understand the apparatus that has produced mass incarceration in the US. She specifies that if an activist wants to abolish the prison-industrial complex in the US it is a necessity to realize the interrelated need to abolish apartheid and end the occupation of Palestine. Davis connects these movements by examining the concerted global strategy to deal with disposable populations from the Global South that involves putting them in a “vast garbage bin” (prison) and creating an “ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free”. Additionally, she notes that the electoral arena is a field for organizing, but cannot and should not be the primary focus of progressive organizers. After all, reform-which is what comes from electoralism-is not enough. For the abolition movement, reform has only ever brought better prisons. For progressive movements like abolition, ideological change is necessary. Likewise, the speeches still included things like mentioning applause, etc, which just... it feels strange to read (or hear) that in a collection one is reading. It's enough to know that the content of the essay was originally written as a speech, but that doesn't mean that it should not be edited for relevance to the new format... where there is no audience reaction or participatory aspect. This is vintage Angela: insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant, asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century." —Mumia Abu-Jamal

Lead Support for Summer for the City Community Programming is provided by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) A nice collection of essays, lectures, speeches and interviews in which Angela Davis challenges us to think harder, to reason more, and to question the status quo. I made over seventy notes. Here are five of them:Ms. Davis concisely framed a couple of long-wondered questions I had. I come from a family that identifies as white working class. Many of my family members struggle to understand the changing social paradigms in this country and will often make very individualistic comments and criticisms about the deconstructing of things that have long been familiar to them. Davis speaks of a broad framework: pro feminism, queer rights, immigration rights, Palestinian rights, anti- racism and capitalism. In her eyes, these are all one. Justice requires our full support of each of these. It is a personal failure not to equally support all of them equally or to see them as one cause. Even though numbers of books, both scholarly and popular, have been written on the role of women in the 1955 Boycott, Dr King, who was actually invited to be a spokesperson for a movement when he was entirely unknown—the movement had already formed—Dr King remains the dominant figure. I'm just gonna say this: I get along better with Palestinians than with American left wing people by far. Operation of Lincoln Center’s public plazas is supported in part with public funds provided by the City of New York

As someone who has known about Angela Davis but never read anything by her before, this was a great introduction to her. 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. Because of this nature, it is at times a bit redundant. But the ways in which she brings to light connections between various freedom movements across the world is powerful.This is my ultimate issue with framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a similar situation to South Africa or the US. There's no road map for what comes next. This isn't a case of "give everyone equal rights and it gets solved". Neither Israelis nor Palestinians dream of a joint country. Partition plans have been floating around since before 1948 and haven't been implemented which suggests a systematic failure.

And I should say parenthetically, when I learned about this in May, I remembered when I was placed on the ten most wanted. I didn’t make the ten most wanted terrorist list, I think they didn’t have one at that time, but I made the most wanted criminal list. And I was represented as armed and dangerous. And you know one of the things I remember thinking to myself, you know, what is this all about? What could I possibly do? And then I realized it wasn’t about me at all, it wasn’t about the individual at all. It was about sending a message to large numbers of people who they thought they could discourage from involvement in the freedom struggles at that time.) But I have been speaking too long. And despite my critique of closures I am compelled by time restrictions to close my talk this evening. So I want to close with an opening. As Carole Boyce Davies has pointed out in her wonderful book on Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx, Claudia Jones was one of the leaders of the Negro Youth Congress (the American Negro Youth Congress and the Southern Youth Congress). And I mention Jones both because of her important work in the US and because she became a pivotal figure in the organizing of Caribbean communities here in Britain after she was arrested for the work she did in the US and eventually deported.

All around the world people are saying that we want to struggle to continue as global communities, to create a world free of xenophonbia and racism, a world from which poverty has been expunged, and the availability of food is not subject to the demands of capitalist profit. I would say a world where a corporation like Monsanto would be deemed criminal. Where homophobia and transphobia can truly be called historical relics along with the punishment of incarceration and institutions of confinement for disabled people; and where everyone learns how to respect the environment and all of the creatures, human and non-human alike, with whom we cohabit our worlds. I took note when she warns the reader in Chapter 8 of feminisms that are too attached to objects. For academics this would be objects of study and for activists this would be objects of organizing. If one becomes too attached to existing objects or categories, we will not allow for flexibility and space for new categories and spaces for liberation. She challenges us to not assimilate trans women into an existing category. Instead, the category may have to change “so it does not simply reflect normative ideas of who counts as women and who doesn’t”. The prison industrial complex is interested in producing legitimizing discourse. It is a profitable business that has nothing to do with justice. Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, was trained in Israel, and so were the police officers who occupied Missouri after the shooting. Israel uses carceral technologies developed in relation to US prisons not only to control more than 8000 Palestinian political prisoners, but also the broader Palestinian population (108). The same tear gas canisters flown in Ferguson are flown towards Palestinian activist. Common injustice develops a symbiotic relationship of solidarity and inspiration. The Palestinians who noticed the equipment used to suppress Ferguson protests were tweeting advice to the U.S. activists. Also, Palestinians organized freedom rides similar to those of the 1960s by boarding segregated buses in occupied Palestine. While we might think of a certain distinct event in relation to struggle, protest, or revolution as a finality or as closure – a historical high point leading to an ultimate triumph of democracy – it is far from being so. Freedom is a [continuous] struggle, and shall we learn to differentiate between the “result” and the “impact” of dissent, we will embrace our struggles as collective and transnational, and we will see our freedom as incomplete if limited to a certain group. As always she talks about feminism, prison industrial complex, racism but she also advocates for a new vocabulary to talk about repressive systems since many of the terminologies we currently use are historically obsolete and only provide a shallow understanding. She provides the example of thinking that changes in the law spontaneously correspond to real world changes, when countless examples have shown that this is far from the truth. She also says that feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism, post-coloniolism, racism and a much broader understanding of gender and sexuality. She writes about how the personal is political, about how our struggles against institution recrafts who we are.

This book promises so much and yet fails itself in the opening of the first chapter, and it’s very unfortunate. Institutions such as the police, the prisons, and the military hold the vast monopoly on violence. You cannot claim support of the establishment and simultaneously disavow their modus operandi. There's a part of me that thinks it would be cool to create a tour of Israel and Palestine that focuses on actual issues, rather than conflict tourism areas. Let's take foreigners to see Bat Yam's poverty and Jisr's shitty infrastructure. Let's talk about how Israeli periphery gets shunned while Tel Avivian academics sit around in conferences and discuss racism, as if it can be disconnected from the overarching societal issues. Let's visit the neighborhoods of Jerusalem that never ever see any tourists. Let's talk about the Palestinian hierarchies, let's talk about how the army both changes the class struggle but also shapes it, the way wealth and politics are intertwined and how they shape police brutality in Israel. Although the book cites and specifies many important things we should start considering, understanding, and realizing, the speeches provided were repetitive. I appreciated the interviews more because of the questions asked along them, which allowed me to ask myself questions and get a broader understanding of the point trying to be made. I understand how sometimes it is necessary to repeat points over and over because, sadly, sometimes people don't want to listen. With that being said, instead of putting repetitive and similar interviews and mentioning topics that were not covered too in depth, I feel like the structure of the book would have been better if, instead of repeating things and only touching on them, the writer/author went more in depth of what she tried to convey. For example, Angela is clearly passionate about prison abolition, so instead of repeating her similar points, it would have been better to go more in depth about it. The same goes for the mentions of feminism, Palestine, and more on Ferguson. Yet, in the opening of Chapter 1, the author throws a voluntary system of economic trade (capitalism) in the same pile, calling it “insidious individualized capitalism” and totally abandons all principle of which you can arrive at every other issue listed.To conclude, I think this is a nice book for fans of Angela Davis but I didn't feel this is quite the must read leftist book that it is often claimed to be.