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

Ferguson, Palestine,
and the Foundations of a Movement

Angela Y. Davis

Edited by Frank Barat

2016 Angela Davis

Published in 2016 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-564-4

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation

and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Abby Weintraub.

Special thanks to Karen Domnguez Burke for transcribing the interviews.

Printed in Canada by union labor.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

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CORNEL WEST

Angela Davis is one of the few great long-distance intellectual freedom fighters in the world. From the revolutionary mass movements of the 1960s to the insurgent social motion in our day, Angela Davis has remained steadfast in her focus on the wretched of the Earth. In stark contrast to most leftists in the academy, her structural analysis and courageous praxis have come at a tremendous cost in her life and for her well-being. As a new assistant professor of philosophy, she was demonized by Governor Ronald Reagan in California. The University of California Board of Regents stripped her of her academic position owing to her membership in the Communist Party. She was put at the top of the FBIs Most Wanted list, on the run from the police forces of the US Empire, and incarcerated after her capture. Her grace and dignity during a historic court trial electrified the world. And her determination to remain true to her revolutionary vocationin the intense international spotlighthas been an inspiration.

After the systematic state execution or incarceration of Black warriors and government incorporation of Black professionals, Angela Davis still stands tall with intellectual power and moral fervor. During the thirty-year ice age of neoliberal rule, Angela Davis remained on fire for the freedom of the poor and working people. Her scholarship on women, workers, and people of color helped keep alive a radical vision, analysis, and praxis during the Reagan and Bush years. Her pioneering intellectual and political work on the boomtown growth of the prison system helped set the foundations for the age of Ferguson. And her ubiquitous lecturing, marvelous teaching, and courageous solidarity in every corner of the globe keep candles of hope burning in the cold and chilling days of neoliberal hegemony. She remainsafter more than fifty years of struggle, suffering, and servicethe most recognizable face of the left in the US Empire.

In this latest text of her magisterial corpus, Angela Davis puts forward her brilliant analyses and resilient witness here and abroad. In a clear and concise manner, she embodies and enacts intersectionalitya structural intellectual and political response to the dynamics of violence, white supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperial policies.

On December 3, 2014, I was blessed to stand alongside my dear sister and comrade Angela Davis at the Oxford Union Debate in memory of the fiftieth anniversary of the great Malcolm Xs presence at the Oxford Union. It was a grand eventwith Angela bringing back the spirit of Malcolm in a magnificent way. This same spirit infuses this book and beckons us to partake of its long-standing joys of serving the people!

FRANK BARAT

I am writing this sitting in my small office in Brussels. The month of June is nearly gone and the heat has just arrived.

I work in a building that hosts various organizations and charities working for global justice. Some focus on Western Sahara; some on Palestine; others on torture, Latin America, or Africa. It is a good environment to work in, surrounded by people who believe in a fairer and better society, and who have decided to act on their beliefs and dedicate their lives to trying to change the world. Sounds utopian, maybe. But the important word here is probably not the one you are thinking of. Its trying. Trying and trying again. Never stopping. That is a victory in itself. Everyone and everything tells you that outside you will not succeed, that it is too late, that we live in an epoch where a revolution cannot happen anymore. Radical changes are a thing of the past. You can be an outsider, but not outside the system, and you can have political beliefs, even radical ones, but they need to stay within the bounds of the permissible, inside that bubble that has been drawn for you by the elites.

My office is located a few steps away from the European Commission headquarters, an imposing building made of grayness and glass that I cycle past every morning. A place that is now flanked by military personnel as well as private security companies. I often wonder what their job is: to protect the people, the human beings inside, or to protect the place itself, the concept, the ideology embodied in it?

This morning, when I visualized Greece in the midst of anti-austerity protests, I saw the contested Europe. People in the streets, from all walks of life, from various generations, chanting, raising flags, rioting. I saw people organizing. I saw local assemblies, clinics run by volunteers. I saw the Acropolis, Exarchia, Syntagma Square. I saw olive trees. I saw the sun. I saw dmokratia. The rule, the power, of the people. The very concept that has lost most of its meaning in todays world. This is a concept that to the big guns of Europe (Germany, France, Italy, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission itself) is only valid and celebrated when it does not diverge from their view of and plans for the world. In the last few months, since the groundbreaking and game-changing elections in Greece, for the first time in Europe a left-wing and anti-austerity party, Syriza, has come into power, and those big guns are trying to make sure that it crumbles and disappears. The party, but more importantly, the message, the idea the party embodies, is under threat. The concept that another way of organizing our lives collectively is possible, that we can be ruled by each other, the 99 percent, instead of technocrats, banks, and corporations. As I write this, the hope that finds expression in the streets and homes all over Greece is a movement. A movement in the midst of a huge loss of material wealth for ordinary Greeks. But theres a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory.

The powerful have sent us a message: obey, and if you seek collective liberation, then you will be collectively punished. In the case of Europe, its the violence of austerity and borders where migrant lives are negated, allowed to drown in sea buffer zones. In the case of the United States, Black and Native lives are systematically choked by an enduring white supremacy that thrives on oppression and settler colonialism, and is backed by drones, the dispossession of territory and identity to millions, mass incarceration, the un-peopleing of people, and resource grabs that deny that indigenous lives matter and that our planet matters. All around us and up close, we are being told not to care. Not to collectivize, not to confront.