Quotes by Angela Davis

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo. Obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.

I became acquainted very early with the widespread presence of an unfortunate syndrome among some Black male activists -- namely to confuse their political activity with an assertion of their maleness. (pg. 159).

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

In this society, dominated as it is by the profit-seeking ventures of monopoly corporations, health has been callously transformed into a commodity -- a commodity that those with means are able to afford, but that is too often entirely beyond the reach of others.

I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.

Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.

I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.

A fair trial would have been no trial at all.

Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

We have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.

I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.

I'm a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.

It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement.

It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.

We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community.

There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.

Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was -- 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within -- internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.

I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible.

I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.

Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.

I'm thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement.

Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

The early feminist argument that violence against women is not inherently a private matter, but has been privatized by the sexist structures of the state, the economy, and the family has had a powerful impact on public consciousness.

I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.

Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.

We must always attempt to lift as we climb.

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

Obviously there are some organizations that go out on the street and say we want an end to the capitalist system. But obviously that is not going to happen as a result of just assuming that stance.

Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative -- these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that's my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the country and other parts of the world.

We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.

Walls turned sideways are bridges.

I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.

Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.

Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

Radical simply means grasping things at the root.

When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery -- did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.

And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Poor people, people of color -- especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

The campaign against the death penalty has been -- while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.

You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo -- obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems.

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'

But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.

As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.

Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Yes, I am a Communist. And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.

Questions about the validity of violence should have been directed to those institutions that held and continue to hold a monopoly on violence: the police, the prisons, the military.

If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.

Progressive struggles--whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues--are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.

In the slave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially brutal form of whipping is described in which the woman was required to lie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole, whose purpose was to safeguard the fetus (conceived as future slave labor).

The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results.

For most of our history the very category human has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.

It is a mistake to assume that all we have to do is guarantee the prosecution of the cop who killed Michael Brown. The major challenge of this period is to infuse a consciousness of the structural character of state violence into the
movements that spontaneously arise.

Local issues have global ramifications.

When Black women stand up-- as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott--as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.

No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism.

The majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them.

It doesn't matter that a Black woman heads the national police. The technology, the regimes, the targets are still the same.

Imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems--racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.

Black history is indeed American history, but it is also world history.

During the commentary on Ferguson, someone pointed out that the purpose of the police is supposed to be to protect and serve. At least, that's their slogan. Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.

Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.

Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.