Today, I will be writing about a book I am reading. The book is called “Angela Y. Davis: Freedom is a constant Struggle, Ferguson, Palestine and the foundations of a movement”. The book is a series of interviews and in depth discussion where Frank Barat asks Angela about the movement of the people, the different struggles around the world and how solidarity movements are formed.
Frank wonders “What are the essential foundations for building a movement? What does it mean physically, philosophically and psychologically?” Angela addresses in this book feminism, the prison-industrial complex locally and globally, Palestine, Ferguson and the political context. It is a book that triggers you to think, analyze and look at oppression from a systematic perspective rather than individual acts.
I leave you with some quotas from the book that I identify with:
- “It seemed to me that if there were hungry children, something was wrong and if I did nothing about it, I would be wrong too.
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The prevailing myth then as now is that poverty is a punishment for idleness and indolence. If you had nothing to show for yourself, it meant that you hadn’t worked hard enough.
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It didn’t make sense to me that all those who had not “made it” were suffering for their lack of desire and the defectiveness of their will to achieve a better life for themselves. If this were true, then, great numbers of our people- perhaps the majority- had really been lazy and shiftless, as white people were always saying.”
- “All over the world now the institution if the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represents major social problems….. The prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problem of this era.
- “We are still faced with the challenge of understanding the complex ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation and ability are intertwined- but also how we move beyond these categories to understand the interrelationships of ideas and processes that seem to be separate and unrelated. Insisting on the connections between struggles and racism in the US and the struggles against the Israeli repression of Palestinians, in this sense is a feminist process.”
- “We have to talk about systematic change. We can’t be content with individual actions.”