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. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. I make no accusations. I do think it is interesting to think about. I finally heard Davis's name in Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching and decided to read more. And you are probably familiar with that quote. ‘We are caught’, he wrote, ‘in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’ Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and buildthe movement for human liberation.And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."

stars and I'll round down because I'm tired of Americans assuming their own racial troubles reflect internationally. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle." 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.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. 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. 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:

of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.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. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation—and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. And I wonder will we ever truly recognize the collective subject of history that was itself produced by radical organizing—early on during the 1930s/1940s, and I am referring, for example, to an organization which was known as the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which has largely been excised from the official historical record because some of its key leaders were communist. 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 book promises so much and yet fails itself in the opening of the first chapter, and it’s very unfortunate.

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. Organizing is not only about mobilization efforts like protests or rallies, but also day-to-day meetings, strategizing, and solidarity-building. It is incumbent upon us not only to recognize these temporal continuities but also to recognize the horizontal continuities, links with a whole range of movements and struggles today. And I want very specifically to mention the ongoing sovereignty struggles in Palestine. In Palestine where not too long ago, Palestinian freedom riders set out to contest the apartheid practices of the state of Israel. And I like the irony of the last line of each of the verses: we’ve struggled so long, we’ve cried so long, we’ve sorrowed so long, we’ve moaned so long, we’ve died so long, we must be free, we must be free. And of course there’s simultaneously resignation and promise in that line, there is critique and inspiration: we must be free, we must be free but are we really free? Davis is also concerned that current political discourse has become flat, meaning that we are unable to conceptualize the working class, let alone poor people. (It is implied she refers to the Marxist’s understanding of the working class and class consciousness.) We also do not talk about globalization when we talk about immigration. Issues should not be either-or.They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle, O Lord, we’ve struggled so long we must be free.

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”. Most Palestinian families have had at least one member imprisoned by the Israeli authorities. There’s currently some 5,000 Palestinian prisoners and we know that since 1967, 40% of the male population has been imprisoned by Israel. The demand to free all Palestinian political prisoners is a key ingredient of the demand to end the occupation.” 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. It’s important for us to recognize the extent to which, in the aftermath of the war on terror, police departments all over the U.S. have been equipped with the means to allegedly ‘fight terror.’ The police slogan is ‘to protect and serve.’ Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.” The book is built of short speeches and interviews. It's short but unfortunately, repeats itself. For example, Davis mentions that Palestinians tweeted Ferguson activists advice about tear gas 4 times or that she was on the FBI wanted list 5 times. Ideas weren't always coherent enough, as often happens in interviews and short speeches. I imagine this is a great book for people who are already familiar with her activism and want some more extra content.And finally, number ten: we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology. So the title of my talk is drawn from a freedom song, which was repeatedly sung in the southern United States during the twentieth century freedom movement. The other verses of that song evoke crying, sorrow, mourning, dying—they say freedom is a constant dying, we’ve died so long we must be free. 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. 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. It is sometimes incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and definitive destruction of a race or people. The Genocide Convention, however, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, defines genocide as any killings on the basis of race, or, in it specific words, as “killing members of the group.” Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnic or religious group is genocide, according to the Convention. Thus, the Convention states, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” is genocide as well as “killing members of the group.”